Abstract
The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance has broken records for five consecutive years, a trend that is unlikely to reverse soon due to overlapping macroeconomic, climate and geopolitical crises. At the same time, aid budgets are failing to keep up, with concerns that humanitarian assistance is not reaching the intended beneficiaries due to those in need clustering in fragile and authoritarian states. A recent white paper by the FCDO highlights the need for innovation to make humanitarian responses more efficient in challenging settings to address this crisis.
These developments beg two questions. How can humanitarian aid be most cost-effectively delivered? How does receiving humanitarian aid shape recipients’ beliefs about the government’s effectiveness and legitimacy and, by extension, their political participation? I propose to study these questions among economically-vulnerable women in Pakistan using a large-scale Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). First, the intervention will compare the effectiveness of two different aid delivery mechanisms: the status quo mechanism, cash, vs. an alternative approach that, in previous work (https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13432), has been found to have considerable potential, aid delivered through digital channels. This will shed light on which of the two delivery methods is most cost-effective, has higher usage rates, and is likely to be diverted by non-recipients. Second, I am particularly interested in studying how receiving aid affects recipients’ political views and participation by comparing aid recipients to individuals in a control group that receives no aid through various real political behaviours and lab-in-the-field experiments.