may not properly identify households affected by shocks. Del Ninno and Mills (2014) conclude that PMT efficacy remains an open issue with respect to the identification of beneficiaries vulnerable to poverty.

# 2. Study Design

## 3.1 Niger Safety Nets Program and Targeting Experiment Design

Niger is among the poorest countries in the world, and resources for social programs are limited. Poverty incidence was estimated at 44.5 percent in 2014, or 51.4 percent in rural areas (World Bank, 2017). This means that 8.17 million people lived in poverty as of 2014, 7.91 million in rural areas. In addition to persistent poverty, there are also recurrent food crises, and even in good agricultural years, between four and five million people experience food shortages.<sup>7</sup> Social protection programs have traditionally been thin and fragmented in Niger. A large share of resources has been spent on emergency response and humanitarian interventions. These interventions are implemented by various institutions, including a range of non‐state actors, with relatively weak government coordination. In 2011, the Government of Niger, with support from the World Bank, set up a national safety nets project. Its objective was to establish an effective and adaptive safety net system that would increase access of poor and vulnerable people to cash transfer and cash for work programs. The cash transfer program provides small, regular transfers or 10,000 FCFA per month (or approximately $20), for 24 months, to poor households. The cash transfer program followed a pilot initiated in 2010 (see Stoeffler et al., 2016), and has expanded over time to reach 100,000 households by 2018.

In a context of overwhelming need but very thin administrative data, there are recurring questions on how to efficiently allocate resources from social programs. Poverty is typically widespread, and the level of inequalities between households is relatively low in rural areas. At the same time, food insecurity affects an important share of households and is largely seasonal (Schnitzer 2016). Since available resources only allow covering a small share of the population in need of support, there are important questions on how to select safety net beneficiaries.

Working with the Government of Niger, we set up a large‐scale randomized experiment to test alternative targeting methods. The experiment was embedded in the second phase of the Niger Safety Nets Program implemented from 2016 to 2018. This second phase operated in 5 regions (out of 8). The cash transfer program used geographical targeting to identify 38 high‐poverty rural communes.<sup>8</sup> Within these communes, there is little data to determine which villages are poorest. The number of villages to be served by the program in each commune was determined so that on average 40 percent of households would be covered by the cash transfer program. All villages were considered eligible and, to ensure transparency, beneficiary villages were selected through public lotteries in the presence of village authorities (Premand

> 7 <u>https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/niger_2018‐02‐23.pdf</u>

> 8 A range of indicators available at the commune level, together with population data, were used to select and allocate beneficiary quotas for regions, departments and communes.

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