Humanitarian aid and its consequences

Last registered on January 06, 2025

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Humanitarian aid and its consequences
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0015121
Initial registration date
January 06, 2025

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
January 06, 2025, 12:58 PM EST

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

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Affiliation
London School of Economics

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2024-12-23
End date
2026-03-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
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.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Fajardo-Steinhäuser, Miguel. 2025. "Humanitarian aid and its consequences." AEA RCT Registry. January 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.15121-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2025-04-01
Intervention End Date
2025-08-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Needs, nutrition, food security, mental wellbeing, aid diversion, agency, empowerment, within household dynamics, political attitudes, outcomes and participation.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Individuals will be randomly assigned to receive aid payments or not. Several aid payments will be sent to those individuals in the treatment groups, while the control group will receive no aid payments. Participants will be surveyed repeatedly as payments are disbursed and after they end to measure the dynamics of the effects.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer.
Randomization Unit
Individual.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
Around 2400 individuals.
Sample size: planned number of observations
Around 2400 individuals.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
700 individuals receive aid payments through digital wallet (digital aid treatment); 700 individuals receive aid payments through their ID cards (cash treatment); 700 individuals do not receive aid payments but know of the program (informed control); 300 individuals do not receive aid payments and are not aware of the program (pure control).
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
London School of Economics
IRB Approval Date
2024-11-06
IRB Approval Number
437993
IRB Name
Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan
IRB Approval Date
2024-11-15
IRB Approval Number
2024-002