Experimental Design
Out of a sample of 130 villages in 5 municipalities of the department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia, 65 communities were randomly offered the "normal" (i.e. conditional -- control group) program that FNB offered, and 65 other communities were offered an unconditional version of the program. The unconditional does not include monitoring visits to participants nor sanctions for non-compliance (one visit will be conducted at the end of the project to document compliance, but no sanction will be applied for non-compliance). All other aspects were kept identical (incentive amount and types, offer protocol, contract details, implementing staff, etc.). All land-owning households in a village are eligible to participate in the program; we did not alter participation conditions.
All 130 villages have participated in a previous RCT with FNB. The goal of that RCT was to measure the impacts of the program. It involved randomly offering the program in 65 communities, and keeping 65 communities as a control group where the program was not offered until the end of the RCT. All 130 communities were included in our project, and offered the program. In our RCT, we stratified the randomization by status in the previous RCT so that 1/2 of the communities offered the conditional program had previously been offered the same program and 1/2 of the communities offered the conditional program had never been offered FNB's program before; 1/2 of the communities offered the unconditional program had previously been offered a conditional version of the program and 1/2 of the communities offered the unconditional program had never been offered FNB's program before.