Social protection is increasingly recognized as a critical strategy for poverty reduction and inclusive growth. Both, the 2030 Agenda, as well as Agenda for Humanity, stress the critical role social protection can play in the fight against poverty and exclusion, but also as a component of resilience building. However, more than 70 percent of the world population, especially in rural areas, lack adequate coverage of social protection; and thus we are still far for achieving universal coverage goals. (ILO, 2014) However, progressively, global and regional level commitments are translating into actions at country level: governments are defining national social protection policies and strategies, as well as allocating national budgets to the expansion and scale-up of social protection programmes, such as cash transfers. This is certainly the case for sub-Saharan Africa where only about 20 percent of the poorest receive social assistance. This brief brings together the critical mass of evidence emerging from recent rigorous impact evaluations of government-run cash transfer programmes in seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These assessments have been developed under the Transfer Project/ From Protection to Production (PtoP) initiative, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in partnership with national governments and research organizations.