background on the position of village heads. Section 3 presents the study’s data. Section 4 analyzes whether the village heads indeed selected poorer households in the village. Section 5 explores what village heads prioritize when making selections. Section 6 analyzes what information they use. Section 7 explores the question of acceptability of the village heads’ selection for other community members. Section 8 concludes.

# 2. Road Maintenance Groups Program and Beneficiary Selection

In rural Lao PDR, remote villages are connected to laterite highways via dirt access roads. Access roads are built by government-hired contractors but typically fall into extreme disrepair and often become unusable within a couple years due to a harsh rainy season. The Road Maintenance Group (RMG) program is a pilot program set up by Lao PDR Poverty Reduction Fund (PRF)<sup>4</sup> with the dual objectives of providing an income-earning opportunity to in-need households and extending the lives of the access roads. The RMG program trains participants to carry out road maintenance activities that do not require heavy machinery and subsequently employs them to provide basic road maintenance services throughout the year. PRF designed the program to be part-time. In order to support women’s empowerment, PRF only hires women to work in RMGs.

The villages participating in the RMG program are poor and have few opportunities for wage work. Compared to rural households in the nationally representative sample in the Lao Expenditure and Consumption Survey (LECS) V, collected in 2013, RMG villages were poorer across a range of indicators including housing composition, ownership of durables, and nutrition.<sup>5</sup> Only 17% of working-age individuals in these villages had paid work outside the household at the start of the program. The RMG jobs were therefore highly attractive to populations living in these villages, but the program aimed to allocate the RMG spots to the poorest households in the villages.

The village heads played an important role in this allocation. First, the village heads were responsible for publicizing the program and inviting households to the registration event, acting to some extent as gatekeepers for information about RMGs. Baird, MacIntosh and Ozler (2013) provide an example of informational elite capture. Their analysis of targeting effectiveness of Tanzania’s flagship CDD program suggests that wealth, education, access to media, and political engagement are positively correlated with awareness of the program, which is a necessary condition for benefitting from it. Such lack of access to information results in only mildly pro-poor targeting.

Second, the village heads contributed to the selection of beneficiaries through updating their poverty ranking. Specifically, beneficiaries for the RMG program were selected through a two-step process in June 2018. In the first step, those eligible to participate in the program were identified. In the second step, as demand for the program exceeded the number of RMG jobs, a lottery (lucky draw) was carried out to

> 4 PRF is housed under the Government Office of Lao PDR. Its mission is to apply a community driven development approach to reduce poverty in Lao PDR, with a focus on rural populations, by improving infrastructure and access to services and resources.

> 5 Authors’ calculations using the baseline data for the RMG impact evaluation and LECS V. Available upon request.

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