Intervention (Hidden)
Public work and PSNP transfer: The 15 selected married male-headed households will continue to participate in public works and receive PSNP transfers based on the household size. The public work transfers will be paid to the respective beneficiaries according to their treatment assignment. Households belonging to the 141 control kebeles will continue receiving the PSNP transfer through the beneficiary originally designated, while married male-headed households in the 282 treatment kebeles will receive the transfer through the woman spouse. The PSNP transfer will be done in cash monthly.
Communication campaign: The first communication campaign was conducted at the kebele level between June and August 2024, and a refresher will be provided prior to the first public work payment of calendar year 2025. All PSNP5 households in treatment kebeles will be sensitized about the objective of the transfers, and the rationale for changing the transfer recipient to women. This will ensure everyone in the kebele is informed about the change in recipient, reinforce the idea that women can manage the money, and make it more acceptable to husbands. The campaign will be accompanied by posters and brochures translated into local languages (Amharic, Oromiffa and Somali) to illustrate the objectives of the change in recipient, in terms of household welfare improvements in the domains of education, health and nutrition. The communication materials will be posted in public places, such as the Kebele office, Cooperatives, and other public areas.
Budget planning activities for groups of women, couples, or both: Households in treatment kebeles (see empirical strategy below) will either participate in budget planning activities in a group of women, in a budget planning activity as a couple, or in both. The content of the activities has been developed collaboratively with the researchers, FSCO, and the firm contracted for the delivery of the training. The activities are expected to maximize the positive impact of the change in transfer recipient and reduce the risks of backlash through gender-based violence (GBV) including but not limited to intimate partner violence (IPV).
- Budget planning activity for groups of women: this will consist in a two-hours discussion session delivered to groups of a target number of 15 women per kebele. The topics will mostly cover women's financial goal setting (see Figure A.3 for examples of the materials used). Women will discuss spending priorities and evaluate the total cash they will have in hand every month, adding the PSNP transfer to their other sources of cash income. The objective is to ensure women understand how much money they will have to manage and are ready to use this money when they get it, and to lead to an effective change in who manages the money.
- Couple’s budget planning activity: this will consist in a one hour facilitated couple discussion delivered individually to seven couples per kebele. Facilitators will visit each couple in their dwelling. The intervention will facilitate a goal setting discussion between couples about household finances (see Figure A.5 for examples of the materials used). The objective is to provide a neutral platform for partners to negotiate and coordinate the use of their cash transfers and reduce the risk of tensions within the household.
Savings information: Early qualitative work conducted by the research team indicated that it was common practice to encourage PSNP beneficiaries to save part of their monthly transfers in a savings account. In addition, beneficiaries had little information about the amount of money they had already saved in the account, and their investment goals often seemed disconnected from what they could realistically do with the amounts of money they had actually saved. This inspired the savings information intervention. All households will be asked to provide information of their current and past savings, and how they plan to use them. The savings information intervention will be implemented with half of the sample (stratified by treatment status for main intervention described above) including control households, during the first wave of the high frequency surveys. It will consist in calculating the total amount of money households have saved so far, and providing feedback on how realistic the household’s investment goals are in relation to their current savings patterns. In addition, households will be encouraged to think about alternative and less ambitious investment goals, in case they fail to meet their primary goal. The objective is to assess whether providing that information encourages beneficiaries to save more, to revisit their investment goals towards more realistic options, or to redirect savings toward consumption if they realize their savings goals are not realistic. Including households from the control group will enable us to test whether traditional recipients of the PSNP transfers (male heads of households) react differently to the savings information compared to the new recipients in the main intervention groups (spouses). In each kebele, while the information on the total amount of savings accumulated will always be provided to the couple, the feedback on realism of the investment goals will be provided to the couple for half of the households selected randomly, and to the wife of the household head only in the other half of the sample. This will enable us to test whether the recipient of the information matters.