Direct Aid to Afghan Women

Last registered on June 23, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Direct Aid to Afghan Women
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0010189
Initial registration date
November 01, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
November 02, 2022, 5:12 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
June 23, 2023, 11:47 AM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
London School of Economics

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Washington University St. Louis
PI Affiliation
University of Texas - Austin
PI Affiliation
London School of Economics

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2022-09-01
End date
2023-05-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
We are evaluating a direct digital payment system. Payments are provided directly to vulnerable Afghan Women. The fundamental goal is to provide humanitarian assistance directly using a modality that is not easily captured by an authoritarian government hostile to western powers - the Taliban. The situation in Afghanistan is dire; the UNDP estimates that an astonishing 97% of Afghans are at risk of falling beneath the poverty line, fueling hunger, malnutrition, and increased migration borne of desperation. Our team has secured funding to provide transfers of 4,000 AFA every two weeks to around 2,400 Afghan women for two months. Beneficiaries will be randomized into two groups. The first group of about 1,225 participants will receive payments immediately, the second group will start receiving payments after two months at which point payments to the first group will conclude. The study focuses on impacts on immediate food and humanitarian needs and on whether the payments are captured by the Taliban.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Callen, Michael et al. 2023. "Direct Aid to Afghan Women." AEA RCT Registry. June 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.10189-1.1
Sponsors & Partners

Partner

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We are evaluating a direct digital payment system to deliver aid directly to vulnerable women in Afghanistan. The fundamental goal is to provide humanitarian assistance directly using a modality that is not easily captured by an authoritarian government hostile to western powers - the Taliban. The situation in Afghanistan is dire; the UNDP estimates that an astonishing 97% of Afghans are at risk of falling beneath the poverty line, fueling hunger, malnutrition, and increased migration borne of desperation. Our team has secured funding to provide transfers of 4,000 AFA every two weeks to around 2,400 Afghan women for two months. Beneficiaries will be randomized into two groups. The first group of about 1,200 participants will receive payments immediately, the remaining participants in the second group will start receiving payments after two months at which point payments to the first group will conclude. The study focuses on impacts on immediate food and humanitarian needs and on whether the payments are captured by the Taliban.
Intervention Start Date
2022-11-06
Intervention End Date
2023-04-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Our primary outcomes will be grouped in three broad categories: needs, informal taxation and economic/wellbeing outcomes. In terms of needs, we will focus on participants’ nutrition (e.g. in how many days have they skipped meals) and access to medicine. In terms of aid capture, we will measure whether the aid payments are (partly or completely) captured either by local government officials/community leaders or other members of the household. In terms of economic/wellbeing outcomes, we will focus on how participants assess their economic situation, their optimism and life satisfaction.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
In our pre-analysis plan attached here, we detail the specific survey questions that will be used to construct the different primary outcomes and how exactly we will define these.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
We will also conduct several descriptive exercises. These include questions related to how participants interacted with the digital payments app and the presence of any hurdles using it, how the aid payments were used, characterizing the population (e.g. whether they are credit constrained and whether they have any experience with mobile mobile or formal banking), and whether spillovers are likely to be a cause of concern in this setting. Moreover, we will compare the characteristics of our sample to a different sample of 5000 digitally-literate women recruited via digital channels that will receive smaller payments (non–experimentally).
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We aim to recruit around 2400 vulnerable women across three cities in Afghanistan: Kabul, Mazar and Herat. Each of these women will get four semi-monthly 4000 AFA aid payments, paid directly to their digital wallets. These women will be then randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group (treatment) will receive the four payments first, while the second group (control) will receive the four payments after the treatment group has finished receiving their aid payments. We will stratify the treatment assignment by neighbourhood and our main outcome variable.
We will have two additional experimental exercises. In one of these, we will randomize the timing of the follow-up calls to participants. This will generate exogenous variation in the amount of days that an individual has to wait to be called since receiving a payment, which will allow us to investigate how reporting varies with the time passed since receiving the aid payments. In the other exercise, we will assess the extent to which experimenter demands play a role in our setting. To do so, we will randomize whether participants receive a short message stating what we are expecting to see in our results (improvements in measures of need) when completing one round of follow-up surveys or not. We will then compare the results between “primed” and “non-primed” participants.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
By computer using Stata’s randtreat command (see Carril, Stata Journal, 2017).
Randomization Unit
We will randomize at the individual level.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
2409 women.
Sample size: planned number of observations
2409 women.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1208 women in the treatment group and 1201 women in the control group.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
For the power calculations, we set a power of 80% and a significance level of 5%. We use Stata’s “power twomeans” command, using the mean and (residual) standard deviation of our main outcome variable (total tea and bread meals in the past seven days) at baseline. The mean and SD of this variable are 13.75 and 2.56, respectively. The residual standard deviation (after controlling for strata fixed effects) is 1.66. With these assumptions, we obtain a Minimum Detectable Effect of 0.1903. For comparison, using data from the third pilot, described above, and two rounds of follow-up surveys (after 1 and 2 payments, respectively), we found a decrease in the outcome variable of 2.48 when estimating the pooled regression in the “Main analysis” section of this PAP. Thus, we should be sufficiently powered to detect effects.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
London School of Economics
IRB Approval Date
2022-05-04
IRB Approval Number
REC ref. 89546
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials