Following decades of problematic and unsuccessful development interventions, unconditional cash transfers have recently received increased attention as a potentially better way of reducing poverty in the global South. Opinions differ however on whether cash transfers ‘only’ contribute to increased consumption or if they can contribute to other, long term processes that can help build more sustainable livelihoods as part reducing poverty permanently. Experiments with unconditional cash transfers have so far taken place too recently and for such short periods of time that it has not been possible to determine how a minor but predictable, dependable grant would affect rural livelihoods in the long term. This paper builds on a study that aims to explore if such grants are likely to have these long term effects and thus could be a better alternative to other development interventions. This is done through revisiting after 14 years the 250 households in two villages in South Africa that took part in an extensive survey on livelihoods and assets in 2002. At that time, Child Support Grants (CSG), comparatively small sums of money paid out monthly, was just being phased in from lower to higher age cohorts, which means that the data from that survey represents a baseline without effects of the CSG. In 2016, the same households were re-surveyed and while some of them had collected a lot of CSG payments over the years for several children, other households had received no or very little grants since their children had aged in advance of the incrementally extended age eligibility threshold. Excluding the households that had not had any children under 18 to support since 2002, this allowed us to compare essentially similar households with children that had received very different amounts of grants. Comparing certain indicators of household livelihood situations between 2002 and 2016 and between households that had collected the most and the least grants yielded insights about if receiving small grants can contribute to a more robust livelihood situation in the long term. While attribution of effects remains elusive, our analysis shows that many of the households that have received the most CSGs are doing better in a number of livelihood related ways, for example they are more likely to have reliable jobs, grow a variety of different vegetables in their gardens and to have several different important assets that reduce labour time for women. However, there is no clear evidence that cash transfers is a way out of poverty and towards sustainable livelihoods for many households. The grant is a basic intervention that needs to be coupled with other interventions that secure people’s rights, opportunities and options. These other interventions are just as important for achieving long term change as the cash transfer itself. However, compared with the very meagre results produced by several other development interventions in these same villages over the same period of time, including agricultural development projects, microfinance, community nursery and community tourism projects, the grants have improved livelihoods and living conditions considerably more.