context-specific understandings of poverty and of who needs help the most. The holistic measures are based on visible household characteristics and potentially on observable community characteristics, as well.

# 7. Is the village head’s role in selection acceptable to the population?

While discussing the random forest analysis of ranking predictors, we observed that there appears to be little or no evidence of elite capture in the village head selection process. Analyzing the performance of village head targeting against PMT suggested that the village heads are better able to incorporate local knowledge, tailoring beneficiary selection to the local context. To access effectiveness of village heads targeting, one more question must be answered: do community members consider village head targeting to be a legitimate method for allocating community resources?

Our survey included two questions that facilitate this inquiry: 1) Do you feel that your village head has a good understanding of how rich or poor most of the households are in your village? 2) When the RMG in this village was selected, the village head advised the selection team on the poverty status of the applicants. Is this a fair practice? These questions were administered to WL and RMG households only – unfortunately, we did not ask the RS households. Below we present the results separately for RMG and WL women, considering that being selected into/out of the program, even if as a result of lottery, may affect RMG/WL women’s view on the overall fairness of the selection process and the role of village heads.

Both RMG and WL women indicate strong confidence in the accuracy and fairness of village head targeting. Sixty-five % of RMG and 67% of WL women thought the village head “absolutely” had a good understanding of the villagers’ wealth. An additional 22% of WL and 19% of RMG members thought the village head understood “to some degree.” There was no significant difference between their responses.

Similarly, the RMG and WL women considered the village head’s role in beneficiary selection to be fair. Sixty-eight % of WL and 70% of RMG thought it was “absolutely” fair, and 18% of WL and 17% of RMG thought it was fair “to some degree.” Again, there was no significant difference in answers between WL and RMG.

Unfortunately, we did not ask the RS households these questions. This leaves open the possibility that those who were admitted to the lucky draw were satisfied with village heads involvement in the process even if they did not ultimately benefit from the program (i.e. were in the control group), whereas those denied the chance to enter the lucky draw could be dissatisfied with the village heads’ role. It is also possible that our respondents indicated satisfaction out of acquiescence bias or hesitation to admonish authority figures. Future studies can inquire more deeply into community-wide acceptance of village head targeting.

# 8. Conclusion

We studied the targeting performance of a multi-province workfare program in rural Lao PDR that used a combination of methods to target poorer women interested in the opportunity to do paid work. To identify poorer women, the program used poverty ranks constructed using PMT and community ranking in 2016 and updated by village heads during the program registration process in 2018. Our results suggest that the program was successful in identifying beneficiaries significantly worse off than a random sample 20