Experimental Design
The study builds on the ongoing effort of WFP Lebanon to prioritize households during the scaling down of its current food assistance program. WFP Lebanon is currently providing food assistance to about 75,000 Lebanese households, which include more than 5% of the population. Assistance is provided in the form of food parcels, whose weight and value depend on household size but correspond to roughly 10Kg or 10USD per person per month. Due to limited resources available, WFP is planning to significantly scale down its program. In 2023 WFP administered a rich census survey to about 58,000 households currently receiving food assistance. The census will be used to identify the 25,000 most vulnerable households among current beneficiaries, who should keep receiving assistance in the next assistance cycle, while assistance will end for the other households. Such prioritization exercise is common among WFP and, more in general, humanitarian organization operations, although different approaches have been used for identifying vulnerable households. In order to shed light on the trade-offs across different approaches, WFP will randomly assign the 58,000 households into four different groups of equal size (about 14,500 households each). Within each group, a different prioritization approach will be used to identify the most vulnerable households. The 6,250 households that are identified as most vulnerable within each group will be those that WFP will keep assisting over the next cycle, reaching in this way the stated target of 25,000 beneficiary households.
The four prioritization methods cover some of the most common approaches currently adopted by WFP as well as other humanitarian organizations whenever targeting their assistance, which are based on Proxy Mean Testing (PMT) or categorical targeting. More specifically, the four different approaches are the following:
1) PMT targeting consumption-based poverty (T1): beneficiaries are identified through a PMT model, designed to identify households with lower consumption per capita (this is the status-quo targeting approach within WFP Lebanon);
2) PMT targeting food (in)security (T2): beneficiaries are identified through a PMT model, designed to identify households with lower food security;
3) PMT using multidimensional vulnerability index (T3): beneficiaries are identified through a PMT model, designed to identify households with a combination of lower food security and lower consumption per capita (more specifically, the index relies on CARI or Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security);
4) Categorical selection (T4): beneficiaries are identified following a list of priority dimensions identified through an expert survey administered to local experts and practitioners.
In practice, the PMT models used in the first three approaches were developed and trained using the Lebanon Vulnerability Assessment Panel (LVAP) dataset, which was also collected in 2023. The models are then applied to the census collected in 2023 by WFP. Households will then be randomly allocated to the four targeting approaches (stratifying by eligibility to ensure balance along that dimension) to define four equally sized groups of 14,500 households. Within each group, households will be ranked based on the associated targeting approach and the 6,250 households deemed most in need of assistance within each group (for a total of 25,000) will be selected as the priority households that WFP will keep assisting in the new cycle, while the remaining 33,000 households will instead stop receiving assistance.
The current practice during prioritization is to inform households a month in advance whether they will be included in the new assistance cycle or not. However, a random subset of about 900 households will be selected among those that will stop receiving assistance in the next cycle, to keep receiving assistance for a period of 7 (rather than 1) months after being informed that assistance will end (i.e. they will have an extended warning window).
The study sample will build on this design and include a representative sample of 6,400 households, selected stratifying by targeting arm, eligibility, and regular or extended warning window.
The objectives of the study are threefold:
First, we will compare outcomes across the four targeting arms to learn which method leads to overall better food security, consumption, and psychological well-being.
Second, we will study the impact of fading out food assistance in terms of food security, consumption, and coping strategies, by comparing outcomes between people assigned to receive assistance and people excluded from assistance while controlling for the initial eligibility status of the households (this will give us the estimated impact on the “marginal” households, i.e. eligible under one targeting method but not another).
Third, we will study whether and how the “extended warning window” leads households to take actions aimed at smoothing consumption over time, by taking advantage of the random variation in the number of months for which assistance will continue after notification.
We plan to explore heterogeneity across the following dimensions: starting level of food security and poverty; household size; gender of the household head