Various social protection policies and programmes, including but not limited to conditional
cash transfers (CCTS), have been implemented all over the world in the past two decades.
However, as programmes requiring vulnerable and poor households to make specific
investments in the health and education needs of their children, CCTs are increasing gaining
grounds as major social protection programmes in many developing countries in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. This follows their acclaimed successes in Mexico and Brazil where they
were first implemented extensively in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This paper critically
analyzes Nigeria’s ‘In Care of the People’ (COPE) CCT programme, with special reference to
its ‘graduation’ strategy. The paper argues that the extent to which graduation can take
place in COPE depends largely on immediate changes to certain debilitating internal and
external factors that militate against ‘sustainable’ graduation from the programme. These
factors range from problems in the design and implementation of the programme to
structural constraints. The paper nevertheless offers some recommendations that can
facilitate the necessary changes.