The treatment and control groups are well balanced with respect to observable characteristics (Table 1). While there are small differences in demographics (the age of the household head, who is almost always the beneficiary’s husband;<sup>11</sup> the beneficiary is female; and the number of children aged 6-15 years), work (the proportion of other adults, excluding the female beneficiary, who are inactive or are day laborers), and food expenditures, they are not jointly significant.<sup>12</sup> In our analysis we control for these unbalanced baseline characteristics. We also compare our main results to those without baseline controls and using a double lasso procedure to select a more parsimonious set of baseline controls (Annex B Table 2); neither alter the main findings.

Consistent with Djibouti’s national statistics, a staggering 82 percent of women in our study have no formal education, matched by a share of 66 percent illiterate household heads who are mostly (90 percent) husbands. In contrast, 77 percent of children aged 6-15 years are formally enrolled in school. At baseline the proportion of women employed or looking for work is very low; only one in ten women worked for income in the 7 days prior to the interview. Half of these women are self-employed, meaning that they almost exclusively selling food, either as street vendors or at a fixed location (e.g., baked goods, khat, ice, produce). Almost no women are self-employed as hairdressers, tailors, construction workers, or transport drivers). Women who report working usually belong to poorer households, are older, and rely significantly more on money from family members to cover the cost of household needs compared to women who do not work. Despite having very little schooling and low socioeconomic status as well as residing under strict social norms, the vast majority of women reported at baseline that they have high aspirations for their daughters’ education (completed secondary), marriage (after the age of 18), and employment (as teachers, in the public sector, or in a high-skill profession).

Among the other adults residing in the households (mostly husbands), 60 percent are working at any given point in time. Of those working, about 60 percent are casual day laborers and one-third are wage/salaried workers. Very few male adults are self-employed. Overall, participating households are poor, spend half of their income on food, and report high food insecurity.<sup>13</sup> Based on the asset index modeled on the national 2017 EDAM

> 11 Ninety percent of households identified the beneficiary’s husband as the head. Among the remaining 10 percent, either the female beneficiary or her daughter is the head.

> 12 The imbalance in food expenditure is due to a few observations at the right tail of the distribution (ofper capita food expenditure) for the control group. This imbalance disappears, however, when we work with natural logs. In our analysis, we introduced a dummy to indicate that the household belongs to the 25<sup>th</sup> percentile of the per capita food expenditure distribution in order to control for the nature of the imbalance at baseline.

> 13 Forty percent of respondents reported some form of food insecurity across six domains, which are captured in baseline survey via the following six questions about food insecurity in the last 7 days: (1) Have you been worried about your household getting enough food? (2) Do you rely on consuming less popular and/or less expensive foods? (3) Do you need to limit portion sizes? (4) Do you reduce the number of meals your household consumes? (5) Do you limit adult consumption so that infants can eat? (6) Do you borrow food or rely on a

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