# Introduction

One of the most frequent topics raised in policy debates on social programs pertains to the choice of methods to select beneficiaries. Although universal coverage of eligible populations is often a long‐term aspiration, many countries face limited budgets, especially in low‐income settings or in the early phases of setting‐up social protection systems. Spreading benefits across a large population would involve substantial transaction costs. In this context, even if some areas may be prioritized through geographical targeting, methods to select beneficiary households are often required.

The challenge of how to select beneficiaries for social programs is particularly salient in low‐income settings. Contexts such as the Sahel illustrate the issues. Poverty and extreme poverty are high, but budgets for social programs are small and safety nets have relatively limited coverage. Multiple non‐state and humanitarian actors operate with a range of programs using different approaches to select beneficiaries. Governments have stated objectives to build national social protection systems. A better understanding of targeting methods is considered a core element in improving coordination and policy effectiveness.

We present results from a randomized experiment analyzing how efficiency, legitimacy and short‐term program effectiveness vary across widely used targeting methods. We worked with the Government of Niger to embed the study in the roll‐out of a national cash transfer program. Specifically, 318 eligible villages were randomly assigned to have beneficiary households selected either through community‐ based targeting (CBT), through a proxy‐means test (PMT) formula designed to identify the poor, or through a formula designed to identify food‐insecure households (FCS). These three methods were chosen as they are the most commonly used methods to select beneficiaries for safety nets in contexts where means‐testing is not feasible, and self‐selection would lead to large oversubscription. The experiment tests two of the targeting methods that are most commonly used around the world (CBT and PMT), as well as another method to identify food‐insecure households akin to the Household Economic Analysis (HEA), which is commonly used among humanitarian actors in regions such as the Sahel.<sup>2</sup> This study makes several contributions to the literature on the targeting of social programs. The study analyzes targeting performance of various targeting methods not only by analyzing their relative efficiency, but also their legitimacy among local populations and how they affect program effectiveness. It also assesses a range of determinants of targeting performance. Together with a paper from Indonesia (Alatas et al. 2012), this is the only randomized study on targeting that is based on actual implementation of the methods. The paper complements the literature in several ways.

First, few studies measure the legitimacy of targeting methods by looking at satisfaction among local populations (Alatas et al., 2012; Cameron and Shah, 2014). An important innovation of this paper is that it documents differences in legitimacy across various methods, but also between beneficiaries and non‐ beneficiaries.

Second, little is known about the actual impacts of targeting choice on social program effectiveness. Studies considering the effect of the choice of targeting method on poverty usually rely on simulations (such as in Brown et al (2017) or Alatas (2012)), or ex post analysis of impact heterogeneity along a range 2 For more information on HEA, see Schnitzer (2016).

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