Myanmar
Myanmar Maternal and Child Cash Transfer
Myanmar's original Maternal and Child Cash Transfer (MCCT) programme was a Department of Social Welfare initiative, financed in part through a World Bank project, providing cash support to pregnant women and mothers of young children during the first 1,000 days of life. Government-led implementation and World Bank financing have been substantially disrupted since the February 2021 coup, and Australian government reporting as of April 2025 describes the original programme in the past tense. Since June 2021, UNICEF and partners have run a related but distinct maternal and child cash transfer scheme targeting poor, conflict-affected families in urban areas including Yangon and Mandalay townships, funded through humanitarian rather than development channels.
Why it matters: The MCCT demonstrates that social protection can generate durable welfare benefits, but it also shows why displacement-sensitive systems need portability, crisis financing, and protected administrative capacity. The political economy archetype has shifted from nascent social protection under crisis stress to humanitarian substitution for a collapsed public system: what began as a government-owned, donor-supported national programme has fragmented into narrower, externally financed humanitarian cash assistance operating in parallel to a state that can no longer be relied on as implementing partner across most of the country.
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