by a local trained volunteer.<sup>1</sup> The sessions educated women on optimal nutrition practices and prevented malnutrition through growth monitoring. Women started attending the monthly group sessions in September 2012.

The second part of the program entailed public works. All households participating in the nutrition sessions were eligible for public works and eligibility was not targeted based on income or assets. In the absence of a national poverty targeting mechanism and very limited social assistance programs, the government rolled out a public works program that, in theory, would reach the poorest households through self-targeting. In practice, however, self-targeting does not occur due to the wage rate, the low rate of the participants’ other foregone income, and the work site’s design features (discussed below).

The public works program included labor-intensive services (e.g., garbage collection, particularly plastic bags), light labor-intensive community works (e.g., street rehabilitation to improve traffic and expand access to surrounding areas), and small group-based artisanal projects. Communities were assigned to the type of project based on the preferences that their community leaders reported. The public works projects commenced, on average, within two weeks of the offer to households. This emergency support project also laid the foundations for developing a social registry system that could be used to identify the beneficiaries of future social assistance programs.

For equity reasons, public works programs often include gender quotas. For example, India’s NREGA reserves one-third of the work opportunities for women and offers equal wages to both men and women (Afridi et al., 2016). Ghana’s labor-intensive public works (LIPW) program requires at least half of the beneficiaries to be women (Dadzie & Ofei-Aboagye, 2021). In both programs, however, the share of participating women has exceeded these quotas. The program in Djibouti had an even more aggressive gender target: women in the first 1,000 days of pregnancy and motherhood. Employment offers in the public works program were eventually made to all women enrolled in the nutrition sessions. Participation, however, could not be offered to all women simultaneously due to capacity constraints for the rollout. Instead, female facilitators who ran the nutrition sessions invited women to participate in the public works program on a rolling basis across locations. By the end of the meetings that announced the program, each woman had to decide whether to accept the offer or delegate the opportunity to any other adult, male or female, who would then perform the work. Although the program was envisioned to be delegated to another household

> 1 At the beginning of each session, a community worker measured and weighed the participants and their children. Pregnant women and those with children aged 0-2 years were enrolled in separate groups. The community-based program followed a standard growth promotion package: sessions lasted about two hours and included nutrition education, growth promotion, cooking sessions, and the distribution of nutritional supplements. If a problem was detected during a session, then the community worker visited the family separately in order to provide more individualized counseling and/or a referral to the nearest health clinic.

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