_2.2 Experimental Design: Burkina Faso Nahouri Cash Transfer Pilot Project Overview_ The 75 villages in Nahouri province that each have a primary school were randomly allocated to the following five groups as illustrated in panel A of Figure 1: (i) conditional cash transfers given to the father (CCTF), (ii) conditional cash transfers given to the mother (CCTM), (iii) unconditional cash transfers given to the father (UCTF), (iv) unconditional cash transfers given to the mother (UCTM), and (v) a control group.<sup>6</sup> There were 15 villages in each treatment arm and in the control group, and only poor households were eligible to receive a cash transfer.<sup>7</sup> Once villages were randomly assigned to the five groups defined above, poor households in the treatment villages were randomly assigned to receive that particular type of cash transfer.

On average, there are approximately 173 households per village. About 82 percent of households were eligible to receive transfers in each village. Mean household assets for poor households were 115,949 FCFA (around $279.4 USD), while for non-poor, non-eligible households it was 203,828 FCFA. In each treatment village, 36 eligible households were randomly selected to receive the transfers. In our three survey rounds (baseline, one-year followup, two-year follow-up) conducted in June 2008, June 2009, and June 2010, we interviewed all poor households in each of the treatment villages who were randomly selected to receive the transfer.<sup>8</sup> In each of these four groups of 15 villages, we interviewed approximately 540 poor households randomly selected to receive transfers. The control group consisted of 615 randomly selected poor households that did not receive a cash transfer in the 15 control villages where no households received cash transfers.<sup>9</sup>

> 6 Due to the low primary school enrollment rates in Burkina Faso, the program intervention focused exclusively on primary schooling as opposed to also covering secondary schools.

> 7 Immediately prior to the baseline survey, we conducted an extended household census in every village to collect information from each household about household living structure (flooring, access to latrine), household asset ownership (plow, cart, draft animals, motorcycle, radio), whether the head of household ever attended school, whether the household grows cotton, and whether there was a weekly market in the village. This information was combined with a Burkina Faso nationally representative household survey to calculate a predicted poverty level for each household and compare that with the national poverty line to determine whether a household is considered poor or non-poor, and subsequently is eligible to receive the cash transfer. Compared to non-poor households, these poor households were less likely to have a head who ever attended school (63 versus 12%), less likely to grow cotton (45 versus 10%), less likely to live in a village with a weekly market (20 versus 11%), less likely to own draft animals (64 versus 35%), less likely to own a motorcycle (55 versus 7%), less likely to own a radio (47 versus 33%), less likely to own a plow or cart (48 versus 35%), and less likely to have access to a latrine (10 versus 1%).

> 8 Our research protocol received IRB clearance from the Institutional Review Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (case #08334) and from the Burkina Faso National IRB (“Comité d’Ethique”).

> 9 To minimize child fostering in response to the program introduction and reduce any potential sample attrition (see Akresh 2009 for evidence on the relationship between income shocks and child fostering), eligibility for cash transfers was based only on the children who were present in the household at the time of the baseline survey.

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