As part of the safety nets project, the formula was applied to data from the registry survey. An FCS score approximating the level of food insecurity was assigned to each household.<sup>14</sup> The ranking of households based on this score, together with the village quotas, and after community validation, determined beneficiary status.

# 3.3 Data and Timeline

Field activities for the study took place between August 2015 and December 2016. Figure 1 illustrates the timing of events.

The first source of data from the experiment comes from a short, large‐scale door‐to‐door registry survey collected in all households in the 318 villages selected to participate in the cash transfer program in the 18 study communes. The survey collected data using a limited set of questions that allowed the application of both the PMT and FCS formulas. In total, 54,051 households were surveyed between August and November 2015.

Shortly after the registry survey, and before any beneficiary selection process was implemented, a baseline survey was collected in a random sample including 12 households in each of the study villages. The registry survey was used as the sampling frame. With 12 households per village, and 318 villages in total, the targeted number of households to be interviewed was 3,816. Of the 3,816 sampled households, 3,479 (or 91%) were interviewed. Among those not interviewed, 70% were households not recognized. This was due to errors in the registry survey, including errors in village identifiers. The remaining were absent. The survey contained detailed information on a number of dimensions, including consumption, food insecurity, anthropometrics (for children under the age of 5), assets, household demographics, education and health status of household members. The baseline survey took place between September and December 2015.

Following the baseline survey, targeting protocols were implemented and households selected for the cash transfer program. The CBT process happened between December 2015 and January 2016. The PMT and FCS formulas were applied in parallel. These steps were followed by the community validation (February to March 2016), registration (March to April 2016) and first cash transfer payments (June to July 2016). The program was scheduled to last for 24 months, until May 2018.

Three to 5 months into the cash transfer program, a follow‐up survey was collected to analyze the legitimacy of the various targeting methods, as well as to document how the transfers were being used and assess short‐term impacts on a limited set of outcomes. The follow‐up survey took place in all 5 regions and 18 communes from the baseline survey, and about half the villages in the baseline were included in the sample.<sup>15</sup> In total, the survey covered 162 villages, in each of which 8 households were

> 14 As for CBT, around 7 percent of households in the top part of the PMT distribution were filtered out from the selection process based on the door‐to‐door registry survey data. Section 5.3 below discusses that this step does not affect the results on targeting performance.

> 15 Sample size was determined based on power calculations to capture differences in legitimacy outcomes.

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