Determinants of Take-Up of a Poverty Graduation Program among Cash Transfer Recipients

Last registered on November 15, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Determinants of Take-Up of a Poverty Graduation Program among Cash Transfer Recipients
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0012342
Initial registration date
November 03, 2023

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 15, 2023, 12:57 PM EST

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

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
PI Affiliation
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2023-10-22
End date
2024-08-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.
Abstract
A persistent challenge with the use of large-scale safety net programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is that the programs have limited turnover and are thus very expensive to operate. Graduation models programs are designed to address this problem through a big push approach, providing large asset transfers, financial inclusion and skills training to promote greater success against poverty reduction. With this in mind, the Government of Egypt has designed a graduation model program, called Forsa, to directly provide a mechanism to support graduation from its national safety net program; however, voluntary take-up of Forsa is limited. In this study, we seek to test the effect of targeted messages on interest in and take-up of Forsa as an alternative to the existing cash transfer program, by randomizing video messages into the end of a household survey in communities where Forsa is available.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Allen IV, James, Daniel O. Gilligan and Sikandra Kurdi. 2023. "Determinants of Take-Up of a Poverty Graduation Program among Cash Transfer Recipients." AEA RCT Registry. November 15. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.12342-1.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The intervention is a video message produced by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS) providing information relevant to households’ decision to participate in the Forsa poverty graduation program. The objective of the video messages is to provide credible information that targets specific concerns that respondents report having about participating in Forsa, as determined through the aforementioned baseline survey and various reports from the project implementers. Treatment assignment will determine which video segments are viewed by the respondents in an edited version of the video.
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2023-10-22
Intervention End Date
2023-11-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Interest in joining Forsa
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Interest in joining Forsa: Following the video intervention, we will ask respondents: “Are you or someone from your household interested in joining Forsa’s self-employment modality?” and also “Are you or someone from your household interested in joining Forsa’s wage-employment modality?”. Our primary outcome will be an indicator equal to one if a respondent answers “Yes” to either of these questions, and zero otherwise. Thus, our primary outcome is the household’s interest in joining Forsa through either modality.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Intensity of interest; mechanism-related outcomes; take-up of Forsa in administrative data
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
INTENSTIY OF INTEREST: Responses to the following post-intervention questions measure the intensity of interest in Forsa and will serve as secondary outcomes:
1. On a scale of 1-5, how much do you want to join Forsa? Your answer will not affect your Forsa benefits. (1=DID NOT WANT TO, 2=A LITTLE, 3=SOMEWHAT, 4=MODERTELY, 5=VERY MUCH)
2. How likely are you or someone from your household to approach your local NGO about joining Forsa in the next two weeks? (1=EXTREMELY UNLIKELY, 2= UNLIKELY, 3=NEUTRAL, 4=LIKELY, 5=EXTREMELY LIKELY)
3. How likely are you to recommend Forsa to a friend or neighbor? Your answer will not affect your Takaful or Forsa benefits. (1=EXTREMELY UNLIKELY, 2= UNLIKELY, 3=NEUTRAL, 4=LIKELY, 5=EXTREMELY LIKELY)

MECHANISM-RELATED OUTCOMES: Responses to post-intervention follow-up questions on the following topics are designed to measure perceptions of how Forsa functions and can be used to test what information was communicated through the video message and what most affected household interest in Forsa.
• Duration of Takaful cash transfers either with or without joining Forsa
• Value of and expected monthly income from the asset transferred through Forsa’s self-employment modality
• Time cost, expected monthly income, and expected longevity of the employment opportunity offered through Forsa’s wage employment modality.
• Perceived potential monthly income from asset-based or wage employment - (gender specific?)
• Expectation of non-monetary benefits either with or without joining Forsa

TAKE-UP OF FORSA IN ADMINISTRATIVE DATA: Working with the Ministry of Social Solidarity, we aim to acquire administrative data on whether households actually join Forsa following the intervention and its rollout in eligible communities. Should we obtain these data, “enrollment in Forsa” will be a key secondary outcome. However, we refrain from pre-specifying this as a primary outcome for a concern that data acquisition may be difficult.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The interventions will be tested using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) study design. The interventions will be randomly assigned to participants as different treatment arms (including a control group). Expecting near 100% compliance, we consider the average treatment effect (ATE) of the randomized interventions on our outcomes.

This study is embedded within the midline data collection of a cluster randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of the Forsa program. The video message intervention will be at the end of the midline survey to allow for comparison across treatments. To study the impacts of the video messaging intervention, the sample consists of the 3,838 households surveyed previously in Forsa-treatment communities (i.e., communities in the cluster RCT who are presently eligible to receive Forsa). Meanwhile, those households in Forsa-control communities—where Forsa is not currently active—will not receive a video message. Since the intervention is embedded in the survey, we expect nearly 100% compliance among treated respondents.
Experimental Design Details
Respondents will be randomized into one of the following treatment arms, which determine the contents of the video message to be viewed by the participant:
• C - Control: Segment 1 only
• T1 - Treatment 1: Segment 1 + Segment 2 = control + info on Takaful cash transfers
• T2 - Treatment 2: Segment 1 + Segment 3 + Segment 4 = control + asset testimonies + female wage testimony)
• T3 – Treatment 3: Segment 1 + Segment 3 + Segment 5 = control + asset testimonies + male wage testimony

In practice, this will be achieved by editing the full-length video message into four separate videos, one for each treatment arms. Therefore, the “Segment 1” viewed by the Control is the same “Segment 1” viewed by T1, T2 and T3, etc. Having the control group also view a video (albeit one with more commonly known information) will rule out that treatment effects are due to the effect of seeing any video and instead are due to the video message’s content.
Randomization Method
Randomization was done at the household level and assigned a 25% probability to a household being assigned to any treatment arm, stratifying by the 160 community designations and baseline Takaful status (i.e., enrollment in the pre-existing cash transfer program). By design, there are 24 study households in the typical community, 16 of which were Takaful beneficiaries at baseline and 8 of which were not. Therefore, within most Forsa-treatment communities, this randomization strategy assigned 4 Takaful-beneficiary households and 2 non-beneficiary households to each treatment arm. Randomization was implemented using Stata/MP 18.
Randomization Unit
Household
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
None.
Sample size: planned number of observations
3,838 households
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Sample size in each treatment arm among the 3,838 target households is as follows:
• C - Control: 968 households (25.22%)
• T1 - Treatment 1: 957 households (24.93%)
• T2 - Treatment 2: 965 households (25.14%)
• T3 – Treatment 3: 948 households (24.70%)
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
In a prior survey, willingness to join Forsa among the sample was 95.8%. So, if we assume a power of 0.8, an alpha of 0.05, and that current willingness to join Forsa among the sample is 95.8%, the minimum detectable effect (MDE) is 2.2 percentage points of any treatment arm relative to the control group. However, we believe that this is an optimistic scenario and suspect that interest to join Forsa has declined significantly as evidence by current reluctance to join the program. Therefore, if we conservatively assume that current willingness to join Forsa among the sample is 50%, the minimum detectable effect (MDE) is 6.5 percentage points. Both are considered acceptable MDEs for the study, showing that we have the power to detect policy-relevant outcomes.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IFPRI Internal Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2021-03-01
IRB Approval Number
7490
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