Cash transfer schemes have been widely examined in Africa, generally with a focus on quantitative evaluation of their social and economic impact. Yet with critical suggestions from gender scholars on the potential gendered effects of cash transfers, few studies have focused on the qualitative and gendered aspects of cash transfers. Using ethnographic fieldwork in the Kenyan South Coast where matrilineal organization has gradually transformed since the pre-colonial period, this paper explores the realities of cash transfers in the everyday lives of poor women heading households. Payments received from the cash transfer scheme for orphans and vulnerable children (CT-OVC) are significant means to these women's and their households' survival. I illustrate how cash transfers have offered opportunity for reinforcing woman-headship embroidered with gendered caregiving roles and responsibilities that women have to continuously ascend to within complex kinship ideologies of caregiving practices. I argue that by providing space for women's negotiation power over care for children, the CT-OVC operating in the Kenya South Coast has mediated production of 'new' gendered ideologies and relations of reproduction and distribution that operate within the rubric of kinship. This, in turn, has reinforced unequal claim-making relations between men and women and recharged caregiving as women's responsibility.

For poor people living at the margins of the global economy, where land-based livelihoods and wage labour are unreliable, the distribution of cash transfers is a life-sustaining activity within recent models of social protection. This leads Ferguson (2015) to contend that African cash transfer programmes are part of a new politics of distribution, in which profound shifts are at play across the Continent involving distributive transfers from government to citizens. The fact of new flows of cash entering households and local economies characterised by profound vulnerability and overwhelming lack of opportunity raises crucial questions over the role(s) cash transfers occupy in 'beneficiaries' lives and over the distribution of 'benefits' within communities. Cash transfers are a means of survival for chronically poor individuals living in rural communities where needs are extensive. In these communities there is an ethos towards giving everyone over time 'a slice of the development cake'. Therefore, this form of distribution generates new inequalities and conflicts lubricated by long-established power relations and social norms. My paper uses empirical data derived from participatory social research on the linkages between social protection and rural employment in Malawi to explore questions of dependency. It reflects on how issues of equity are brought to the fore in the shifting dynamics of distribution. In this changing terrain over the distribution of development benefits, one can caution against a simplistic equation of cash transfers with dependency, but nevertheless questions are raised regarding the distribution of benefits and emergence of new challenges for the realisation of social equity.

A 2002 World Bank report outlined that remittances from migrants in rich countries outstrip the combined total of official development assistance (ODA), sparking a euphoric progression of institutional and scholarly interest; while popular discourse claimed that structural adjustment programmes and general dependence on external finance have been the dearth of development. The so-called migration-development nexus has since re-emerged and now views the diaspora as new development actors and financiers with strong socio-cultural ties to their home countries. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study of Zimbabweans in the UK and some of their development efforts back home, this research interrogates the mainstream argument that the diaspora are a development panacea free of the adverse external conditionalities.

This paper presents findings from a rural farming community at the foot of the Matopos Rocks south of Bulawayo, where diaspora contributions assist in linking smallholder farmers to sustainable larger markets by incorporating them into the value chain through a local agribusiness. It shows that diaspora finances are not "value free" as they become incorporated into existing socio-political relations at home, albeit without diaspora presence. While these funds are intended to liberate smallholder producers, data suggests the formation of a "disguised proletariat" where the agribusiness infiltrates private homesteads, restructuring work and social relations while deepening a dependent relationship and reproducing what Hobsbawm (1969) provocatively called Neo-Feudalism. This brings into question the diaspora's ability to influence actual "development practice" at home, despite the new call for diaspora-led development assistance.