# _IV.3 - Participation_

The degree of participation in the distribution describes the extent to which ordinary villagers and marginalized groups (such as women) participate in the process of selecting the recipient households. It also describes the transparency of the process – that is, whether villagers were informed of the distribution outcomes – and whether there were any disputes among villagers and/or the village leaders about the distribution. Our expectations of how the interventions will affect such outcomes are formalized in the following hypothesis: _Hypothesis 5_ . The interventions will result in more participatory decision-making processes.

# **V. Methodology**

To test the hypotheses outlined above we use villages in which aid distribution was performed by traditional leaders as the baseline group and compare the outcomes in this group with the outcomes in (i) villages in which elected councils were put in charge of the distribution; (ii) NSP villages in which elected councils were not mandated to manage the distribution; and (iii) non-NSP villages in which female involvement was mandated. In particular, we estimate the following regression: where Yvi is the outcome of interest for observation _i_ in village _v_ ;<sup>11</sup> Mv is a dummy variable that equals one if an NSP village _v_ was assigned to have its distribution managed by the elected council and zero otherwise; Nv is a dummy variable that equals one if village _v_ is an NSP village in which the elected council was not mandated to manage the distribution and zero otherwise; Fv is a dummy variable that equals one if a nonNSP village _v_ is assigned to mandated female involvement and zero otherwise; φp is the village-pair fixed effect, and εvi is the error term. Following Bruhn and McKenzie (2009), village-pair fixed effects are included to account for the use of pair-wise village matches in the allocation of treatment. Standard errors are clustered by village-cluster to account for correlation of residuals within village-clusters due to nonindependence of assignment. Table A1 in the Appendix describes in detail all the indicators that we use to test each of the five hypotheses. In Table A2 we indicate and explain several cases where we deviate from the pre-analysis plan, which is usually due to a misspecification in the plan.

# _V.1 – Identifying Wheat Recipients_

Hypothesis 1 and the first indicator for Hypothesis 4 prescribe the comparison of recipients with other villagers and thus necessitate the identification of recipients. However, as the distribution is not directly observed, there is no definitive means to identify recipients. We use the following three sets of information provided by village leaders and survey respondents to identify potential recipients: (i) lists of recipients prepared by village leaders; (ii) self-reports by male and female survey respondents that their household received wheat; and (iii) households indicated as recipients by other male and female survey respondents.<sup>12</sup> As there is no _a priori_ reason to believe that one of these sources is more reliable than the other, three subsamples of ‘recipient’ households are constructed:

- i. _Self-Reported Recipients_ : Households in which either the male or female respondent self-reports that the household received wheat from the distribution (regardless of whether the household is designated by local leaders as a recipient);

> 11 Table A1 provides information on the construction of indicators and the corresponding units of analysis (household or individual respondent) and subsamples (random sample of households, subsample of wheat recipients, or the combination of both).

> 12 The sets of households within a village suggested by these sources could be partially intersecting.

10