Humanitarian Aid and Refugee Self-Reliance

All households in the study are recipients of a 6-month long cash transfer program. Households are divided across three treatments:
- Control (or "Cash Only"): Households receive the cash transfer ‘as is’, in one envelope.
- MA: Same as control; in addition, households are offered the opportunity to decide, at baseline, whether they would like to receive future monthly cash transfers in four labelled envelopes (labelled ‘education’, ‘health’, ‘investment’, and ‘other’), or one envelope (status quo). If they opt for the four labelled envelopes, the household is asked how they would like to divide the cash they receive across the four envelopes; all future cash will then be allocated accordingly.
- MAD: Identical to MA, except that households are shown a recommendation of the allocation across the four envelopes, developed by the Uganda Humanitarian Cash Working Group, if they opt for the four envelopes instead of one. Households can either accept this recommendation across the four labelled envelopes, or adjust it as they wish.

2022-09-26

2023-04-28

Self-Reliance, Poverty, household income (source and amount), children’s school performance and attendance, physical and mental health, savings and investment behavior, ability to respond to shocks, ability to allocate money based on stated preferences.

The midline (in 2023) will also focus on identifying the mechanisms through which our interventions influence primary outcomes, while the endline will only measure the primary outcomes. Survey data will be complemented with objective measures where possible (e.g. school attendance and performance reports from schools, and health outcomes).

Bad habits, aspirations, remittances, preferences.

We are also interested in heterogeneous treatment effects of the interventions based on baseline values of gender of the household head, vulnerability level of the household, self-control, and psychological indices (including depression and aspirations). While we were able to stratify on gender and vulnerability during the randomization process, we were unable to do so for self-control and the psychological indices as these were only measured at baseline (which was implemented after households had been allocated to one of the three treatment arms).

Households are participants in a cash transfer programme by a humanitarian organization in North-Western Uganda. All households are entitled to receive a monthly cash transfer (UGX 30,000 per household member) for a period of 6 months. At baseline, all households had already received one instalment, and thus our interventions are with respect to the remaining five cash transfers. The households are randomized across three treatments.

The baseline survey will take place in September and October 2022, while the midline survey will take place in Spring 2023, upon completion of the cash transfers and intervention. An endline survey will take place one year after the midline, in Spring 2024.

Not available

Computerized stratified random assignment. Stratification variables: Zone of residence, year of arrival (median split), age of the household head (median split), his/her gender, country of origin, and the household’s vulnerability score.

Randomization was implemented before the baseline survey had been completed; households’ preferences regarding the allocation of the transfer over the four envelopes were elicited during the baseline survey itself. That means that we were unable to stratify on self-control scores and a psychological index, as these were only measured during the baseline survey.

Household level randomization

No

No clustering planned.

861 households

292 in Cash Only (= contro), 288 in the Mental Accounting (MA) treatment, 281 in the Mental Accounting + Default (MAD) treatment.

0.235 standard deviations, for an 80% power at the 5% significance criterion. Assumptions: explanatory power of stratified variables of outcome variable: 20%; attrition rate: 20%, two-sided t-test. This is a very conservative estimate as the mean stay in the refugee camps is over 5 years, and hence attrition rates are expected to be much lower than 20%.