Daniel Gilligan

Can a light-touch graduation model enhance livelihood outcomes? Evidence from Ethiopia

Incentives, administrative capture and preference aggregation in community-based targeting

Community-based targeting (CBT), which leverages community leaders to identify eligible beneficiaries, is widely used in social protection programs and development interventions, especially in data-scarce settings. Yet, little is known about how these leaders respond to opportunities for potential resource leakages and elite capture, and whether such behavior is moderated by budget constraints or the level of discretion given to leaders. Similarly, how community leaders involved in CBT aggregate individual preferences into collective decisions remains understudied. We conduct a cluster-randomized experiment in 180 Ethiopian villages to study the effects of incentive structures and discretion on administrative capture—defined as funds retained under the disguise of covering “administrative” costs. Local leaders were tasked with allocating real or hypothetical transfer budgets, with discretion to retain up to 10 percent as “administrative costs”. To uncover decision-making and preference aggregation within CBT committees, we elicited these decisions (proposals to retain a portion of the budget) individually as well as collectively. We find that financial incentives significantly increase administrative (elite) capture, and that capture increases with budget size. Group decisions yield higher appropriation than individual proposals, suggesting implicit collusion rather than prosocial restraint in group-based decisions. Moreover, when real stakes are at play, group outcomes are disproportionately shaped by extreme (outlier) preferences, whereas in hypothetical settings without actual transfers, popular preferences dominate. These findings highlight behavioral mechanisms underlying collective decision-making and administrative capture in CBT, which can inform the design of more accountable CBT systems.

The impact of a nutrition-sensitive graduation model program on child nutrition: Experimental evidence from Ethiopia

Multifaceted graduation models are a promising strategy to sustainably reduce poverty, yet evidence on their effects on child undernutrition remains limited. This randomized controlled trial evaluated a nutrition-sensitive graduation model combining village economic and savings associations, peer-led behavior change communication, and maternal cash transfers (and for a subset, lump-sum livelihoods transfers) implemented among ultra-poor households in rural Ethiopia. The model without maternal cash transfers improved maternal nutrition knowledge and financial inclusion but did not generate meaningful changes in children’s diets or growth. Supplementing the pro-gram with maternal cash transfers produced at least moderate improvements in child diet quality, early childhood development, household consumption, and assets. The largest improvements in child growth occurred among households receiving both the livelihoods grant and maternal cash transfers. Overall, the results suggest that coupling behavior change communication and livelihoods support with sufficient financial support is critical for achieving meaningful progress in both economic well-being and child nutrition.