Impact Evaluation of Delivering Support as Cash versus Mobile Money in South Sudan

This impact evaluation will test two alternative methods to deliver support, cash and mobile money, in the context of two WFP programmes, social safety nets (SSN) and asset creation and livelihoods (ACL), in South Sudan.

SSN consists of 8 months of unconditional transfers, while ACL is relatively smaller and amounts to 3 months of conditional support. The sample for the impact evaluation includes mostly ACL villages (approximately 90%).

The ACL programme makes transfers to households against their commitment to work on creating or rehabilitating communal assets. The goal is to improve food security, restore livelihoods, while contributing to peace. The assets created by the programme include land restoration, water management solutions, feeder road construction or rehabilitation, cultivation of agricultural land, and the creation of infrastructure for livelihood diversification. The SSN programme, too, aims to help households meet their basic needs and improve resilience. The programme targets eligible urban and peri-urban areas based on their relative poverty and food insecurity.

WFP’s Country Office in South Sudan has traditionally been delivering support as either cash or in-kind (e.g., cereals and pulses), the modality being informed by county-level market assessments. Moving forward, however, the Country Office aims to switch to mobile money where cash is a feasible delivery method. A significant expansion is thus planned for 2026, with further scale-up efforts thereafter until the switch to mobile money is complete where possible.

2026-05-01

2026-12-31

We will aim to collect the following main categories of outcomes:

1. Household finances: digital financial inclusion, saving, borrowing, incoming transfers, loaning, outgoing transfers. On this topic, other related outcomes will be included to grasp the household’s support network, its participation in formal and informal sharing mechanisms as part of customs, the reasons behind the various reported transactions, as well as modality, amount, frequency, interest, etc.
2. Gendered outcomes such as intra-household decision-making dynamics.
3. Food security: e.g., Food Consumption Score, Food Insecurity Experience Scale, and Household Hunger Scale.
4. Social capital and trust: e.g., Subjectively Evaluated Resilience Score, trust in institutions, focusing on financial intermediaries.
5. Monitoring: how the ACL/SSN support is spent, the cost, safety, and ease of accessing the ACL/SSN support.
6. Phone usage: frequency, purpose, amounts for transactions, etc.

Additionally, we also aim to collect data on household durables and livestock as well as the gender, age, and education of beneficiaries to grasp heterogeneities in terms of the cash vs. mobile money comparison and explore whether this comparison yields different insights for different sub-groups of households, as defined by the above dimensions.

Finally, we plan to collect data on shocks to assess potential differences in household resilience when facing shocks in the cash vs. mobile money arms.

We implement a two-arm cluster-randomized controlled trial in which approximately 126 villages are randomly assigned, in equal proportions, to receive either cash transfers or mobile money transfers. The village-level randomization reflects the operational scale of program delivery and mitigates concerns about within-community spillovers. Treatment effects are estimated by comparing mean outcomes across arms, with inference adjusted for intra-cluster correlation.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer.

The randomization is conducted at the village level, i.e., all households within a village will benefit from the same transfer modality.

Yes

Our research will include approximately 126 clusters. The clusters are villages across three counties and one municipality in two different states in South Sudan. The clustered randomization was stratified at the payam level, which is two levels above the village and one level below the county.

There will be two waves of data collection with a targeted average of 15 surveys per village in each round, which leads to a total of approximately 3,750 household observations.

The sample will be divided equally between the two arms: approximately 63 villages will receive their support as cash-in-hand, and 63 villages will switch to mobile money.

The minimum detectable effect is ten percent (10% = 0.1) increase in individual phone usage. (standard deviation: 0.49)