One of the starkest impacts was in terms of investments in new businesses. The treatment households were nearly four times more likely than control households to establish new enterprises: only 9 percent of the control households reported that household members had set up new enterprises during the previous three months, compared with 34 percent in the treatment group. Petty trading was the most common type of new enterprise in both urban and rural areas among both the treatment group and the control group.

# **VI. Cost‐Effectiveness**

Since the primary goal of the program was to increase access to short‐term employment opportunities by providing an income supplement for vulnerable youth through PW, cost‐effectiveness analysis was conducted on two main outcomes: (1) the net number of temporary jobs created and (2) the net increase in household incomes. The analysis broadly follows the methodology outlined in Dhaliwal et al. (2011), which seeks to measure the effect a program achieves in terms of outcomes of interest at a given cost. The ITT impact estimates used to calculate the cost‐effectiveness ratios are significant at the 1 percent level. Given that existing evaluations of PW programs are limited and that cost‐effectiveness estimates are even scarcer, particularly in the Sub‐Saharan African context, this paper does not provide comparisons with other programs. Nonetheless, these estimates are presented to aid future comparisons.

The average cost per subproject was approximately $16,000, of which an average 60 percent was allocated toward the payment of wages, while the remaining 40 percent covered contractor fees, materials to implement the works, and COC administrative costs. In addition to these costs, NaCSA incurred operational costs in the range of 10 percent to 15 percent of the subproject costs for implementation support and the monitoring of subproject design and implementation. This implies an average total cost per subproject of between $17,600 and $18,400 or an aggregate cost over the 143 treatment communities of between $2.5 million and $2.6 million. For simplicity, the cost‐effectiveness ratios are calculated based on the higher share of administrative costs, at 15 percent.

The ITT estimate of net job creation beyond the jobs directly created by the PW program yields a total of 4,343 jobs in the 143 treatment communities. Combining this with the 8,944 jobs directly created by the program in these communities implies a cost of approximately $198 per temporary job created, including all administrative costs. If account is taken only of the share of the cost designated as direct transfers to beneficiaries, the cost per temporary job created would be $103. The ITT estimate of the impact on net household income was Le 86,078 (approximately $21) or a total of Le 769,881,632 (approximately $185,000) when aggregated across the 8,944 treated households in the 143 treatment communities. Including all administrative costs, this implies that about every $14 spent on the program generated an additional $1 of household income. Excluding all administrative costs, the cost‐effectiveness ratio for net income gains would be about half this amount. Thus, each $7 designated as a direct transfer to beneficiaries generated an additional $1 of income.

These cost‐effectiveness estimates exclude the spillovers to nonregistered beneficiaries that occurred because of informal rotation practices as well as program leakage. These estimates also capture only the pure labor and economic welfare effects and exclude other important secondary impacts on welfare, particularly the impacts on social outcomes such as improved intrahousehold bargaining and greater utilization of health services. They can therefore be considered conservative estimates of the program’s 15