CDGP Nutrition Intervention

The Child Development Grant Programme (CGDP) will pilot a cash transfer programme that will focus on removing the food security and financial barriers to improving nutrition. The programme will operate in rural areas of two states in Nigeria: Jigawa and Zamfara.

By providing cash to poor women, it is expected that the programme will enable them to buy more and better quality food and also to spend money on education and health. The project, which will be implemented by Save the Children (SC) and Action Against Hunger (ACF) will provide a child development grant (CDG) of approximately 3,500 Naira (£14) a month to mothers, from the time they are confirmed to be pregnant until the child is two years old.

The design of the evaluation is such that there will be a control group, a first treatment group of mothers that receive the unconditional cash grant plus basic, "low intensity" nutritional education and advice to mothers, and in another treatment arm this unconditional cash transfer will be supplemented by the provision of "high intensity" nutritional education and advice to mothers.

2014-09-01

2017-08-01

The quantitative component of the impact evaluation is designed to quantify the impact of the CDG programme. We aim to rigorously test the impact of the programme on key indicators, as well as to compare the difference in key indicators when the unconditional cash transfers are delivered with high verses low intensity nutritional education and advice to mothers.

The key evaluation questions as are:

i) Has the programme contributed to reducing stunting, wasting and underweight in children and how does this vary by gender of the child?
ii) Has the programme contributed to an improvement in the food security and dietary diversity?
iii) Has the programme contributed to a reduction in the percentage of households liquidating productive assets in the hungry season or in the face of economic stress?
iv) Has the programme contributed to changes in men and women’s knowledge about nutrition and infant and young child feeding?

Eligibility criterion: pregnant mother

Control group
Treatment one: mothers receive the unconditional cash transfer from the time they are confirmed to be pregnant until the child is two years old and low intensity nutritional education and advice to mothers (mainly delivered via sms)
Treatment two: as treatment one, but eligible mothers also receive high intensity nutritional education and advice to mothers (delivered in group and one-to-one sessions)

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Randomization is by village

Yes

210 villages split equally into control and two treatment groups (so 70 villages in each).

TBD: accurate pre-intervention population sizes by village or traditional ward are unavailable.

Approximately 1800 women in control group, 1800 in treatment one, and 1800 in treatment two. The women chosen to be in the sample from the initial household listing will be of two types:
1. those pregnant during the listing and so eligible for the grant immediately
2. those estimated to be the most likely to become pregnant during the evaluation period.

Since the extremely high prevalence of stunting in Northern Nigeria is one of the main concerns that the CDGP aims to address, the power calculation detailed below is based on the measurement of changes in child height-for-age z scores (HAZ). They are measured in standard deviations and calculated as follows: HAZ=measured height-median height in reference population for same age and sex/standard deviation of reference population The reference population used here is the 2006 WHO Multi-Centre Growth Reference Study, which combines observations from a range of different ethnic groups from six countries to construct a universal growth standard. A HAZ of 0 means that the child’s height is normal for their age and sex. According to global convention a score of less than -2 indicates stunting and a score of less than -3 indicates severe stunting. In order to predict the likely size of the effect that the CDGP may have on HAZ, we conducted a review of other impact evaluations of unconditional and conditional cash transfer programs and nutrition education interventions. Based on existing evidence, we have conducted our power calculations with the aim of detecting a 0.2 SD change in HAZ or children in target households in the three years between baseline and endline. This is the expected change between Treatment Group 1 and the control group. Similarly, we aim to detect a 0.2 SD change in HAZ between Treatment Group 1 and Treatment Group 2. We have estimated the required sample size per cluster assuming 210 clusters. As we have two treatment groups and one control group, this translates to 70 clusters per treatment type. All calculations are based on a power of 0.8 and significance level of 0.05. With a MDE of .2, and an assumed ICC of .1 (.05), we require 12(8) pregnant women per cluster to be surveyed. This gives a total of 2520 (1680) pregnant women in total to include in the evaluation. Using estimates derived from the NDHS for Nigeria (2008) we expect to be able to find such numbers of pregnant women at baseline in the surveyed states.