councils had been elected. Food aid (wheat) was delivered to village leaders, who were responsible for distributing it to vulnerable households. Wheat was donated by USAID and WFP assisted with distribution logistics. Each village was given enough wheat for one sixth of the village households for half a month.<sup>6</sup> The distribution and data collection necessitated three visits to each village: <u>First Visit: At the first visit, a distribution agent convened a short meeting with village leaders, at which</u> they were informed of the amount to be delivered and asked to prepare a list of recipients (with corresponding amounts), to be collected when the aid is delivered three days later. As described in Section III.3, we induced randomized variation in how village leaders were selected for the meeting.

<u>Second Visit: Three days later, independent contractors hired by WFP delivered the allocated wheat to</u> village leaders and collected the recipient list. In order to limit any effect on distribution outcomes of monitoring of the distribution, wheat was delivered to village leaders identified during the first visit and there were no attempts to observe the delivery of the wheat to households selected by the village leaders.

<u>Third Visit: Ten days after the delivery, a team of enumerators made an unannounced visit to the village</u> to administer household surveys designed to collect data on distribution outcomes.<sup>7</sup> These surveys were directed to three groups of villagers: i) a random sample of village households; ii) a random sample of households listed as recipients by the village leaders (listed recipients); and iii) a random sample of households that the random sample of village households indicated had received wheat but that were not listed by village leaders (peer-reported recipients).<sup>8</sup> All three sets of questionnaires were administered to a male and a female respondent in the same household. Questionnaires, which were identical across the three groups, collected basic demographic and socioeconomic data on respondent’s household, as well as information on the wheat distribution and characteristics of recipient households. An average of 27 male and female surveys were conducted in each village, encompassing an average of 14 surveys of randomly selected village households, 10 surveys of randomly selected listed recipients, and 5 randomly selected peer-reported recipients.

_III.3 - Variation in Management of Distribution_ As noted above, elected councils may affect local governance – and, by extension, aid distribution outcomes – either directly by affecting the composition and/or indirectly by changing the behavior of the village leadership. To isolate these two effects, randomized variation was induced in the procedures for the first visit to villages with elected councils. In half of NSP villages, male and female elected council members were invited to the meeting by the distribution agent and asked to select recipients and distribute aid (such villages are collectively referred to as, ‘mandated council’ villages). In the other half of NSP villages, ‘village leaders’ were invited to the meeting and asked to select recipients and distribute aid (such villages are referred to as ‘non-mandated council’ villages). Village leaders ordinarily include the village headman and members of the customary village council. Elected council members were not specifically invited, so they were included only in villages in which they were considered village leaders. This randomized variation is used to identify the effects of mandating council management of the distribution (see Figure 2).

> 6 The decision rule was not shared with villagers or leaders, who were only informed of the total amount of food aid designated to their village. The exact amount was determined based on WFP guidelines of 81 kg per household of six per month. Village allocations were rounded up to the closest multiple of 50 kg as this was the size of sacks in which wheat was distributed. The average amount of wheat distributed in each village was 1,100 kg.

> 7 To prevent information about the survey from spreading across villages, we surveyed all the villages in a district as quickly as possible, while also surveying them in a sequence that would minimize the geographic spread of information about the survey. 8 As the surveys of wheat recipients are not representative of the average villager, we use information from these surveys only to measure characteristics of recipients.

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