revenues (Ikegami et al., 2017; Hanna and Olken, 2018; Banerjee et al., 2019). In Sahelian countries, even programs targeting poor households do not manage to cover the entire national territory, and social programs reach a relatively small proportion of the population (Monchuk, 2013; Beegle et al., 2018).<sup>6</sup> In this regard, social-protection programs do not differ from other development interventions that target specific geographic areas and populations.<sup>7</sup> Because targeting is likely to remain the norm _de facto_ in lowincome environments (despite potential aspirations to universalism), studying targeting remains a relevant economic question (Banerjee et al., 2019).

That being said, if we assume a fixed budget constraint for the allocation of social protection resources, the debate on “universalism” points to important trade-offs for targeting transfers. The first trade-off regards transfer amounts: one can choose to include more people (potentially everyone) with lower benefits or to target fewer people with higher levels of benefits. The second trade-off regards the geographic areas: one can decide to include more people (or everyone) in fewer geographic areas (e.g., villages) _vs._ to fewer people in more geographic areas. All programs implicitly face these trade-offs, and some analyses have attempted to measure their implications on targeting performance (e.g. Brown et al., 2018; Schnitzer, 2019). But several dimensions have been left aside, such as how these trade-offs affect spillover effects on nonbeneficiaries, the legitimacy of the program, and the impacts of the transfer (e.g. does providing lower transfer amounts dilute the effects of the transfers?). We consider these trade-offs when we discuss the critical importance of program coverage.

Finally, targeting is ultimately a policy issue, and it is not possible to make optimal choices in terms of targeting strategy without defining the goals and the criteria for assessing its performance. “What is the target?” is thus an important public policy question, but it is rarely clearly defined _ex-ante_ (Stoeffler et al., 2020; Schnitzer, 2019). Cash transfers in particular address a wide variety of distinct, competing objectives (e.g., improving nutrition, health, and education for children, and generating investments in productive assets and agriculture). In the absence of clearly defined goals, targeting studies do test performance along several welfare metrics such as food security, per-capita consumption, an asset index, a health index, or poverty self-assessment, (Alatas et al. 2012; Schnitzer 2018; Premand & Schnitzer 2020; Stoeffler et al. 2016; Çubukçu & Stoeffler 2019). Several of these studies (although not all) have found that one targeting

> 6 An additional challenge is a logistical one in low administrative capacity environments. Providing cash transfers in the Sahel is non-trivial in terms of uniquely identifying and registering beneficiaries, delivering transfers, and administering the program (among others) and requires a strong infrastructure in addition to technical capacities. Both universal and targeted programs would share this difficulty if they were implemented without prior geographic targeting (see below).

> 7 For instance, Briggs (2017b) and Briggs (2018) show that foreign aid tends to target wealthier regions and households in Africa. Burgess et al. (2015) show that road construction in Kenya is politically targeted based on the leader’s ethnicity during non-democratic periods, which is costly in terms of economic growth.

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