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Trinity Impact Evaluation Unit (TIME)

You are here Research > Social Protection > Testing Targeting Variants for Emergency Transfers DRC

Testing Targeting Variants for Emergency Transfers in DRC

emergency transfers

  • Researchers:

    • Felipe Alexander Dunsch, Andrea Guariso, Jonas Heirman, Marcus Holmlund, Kristen McCollum and Iva Trako

  • Partners:

    • World Food Programme, World Babk

  • Location:

    • Congo DRC

  • Sample:

    • 3,300 households located across 84 blocs in Congo DRC

  • Timeline:

    • 2023 - 2024 

  • Theme:

    • Welfare, Poverty

  • Description:

    • Governments and international organizations around the globe implement specific targeting approaches to identify the beneficiaries of their programs. The choice of a specific targeting approach and its consequences on individuals and communities have been highly debated. In this study, realized in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), we compare the relative effectiveness of two targeting approaches that aim to identify the households most in need of food aid in a fragile setting. The first approach is data-driven and represents the current status quo. The identification of beneficiaries rests on a standard proxy mean testing (PMT) approach, augmented with inputs from focus groups conducted across 3 communities that could highlight criteria that are particularly relevant to the study context (any criteria emerging from the focus group would then be applied across all target communities). The second, new, approach is instead fully community driven: a local community committee is set up within each target community and is exclusively in charge of identifying all and only criteria to be used to select beneficiaries within that community. The study is based on a cluster randomized trial (experimental) approach: 84 community “blocs” in DRC’s Tanganyika Province were randomly assigned to one of the two targeting variants. We will collect data from a representative sample of 40 households in each community to assess how the two approaches differ in terms of targeting (inclusion/exclusion errors), community satisfaction, social cohesion, and women empowerment.

      More specifically, the primary research questions are the following:


      a. How does the status-quo data-driven “proxy mean testing plus” (PMT+) targeting approach compare in terms of targeting precision (inclusion/exclusion error), with respect to a committee-based (CB) approach?


      b. How does the status-quo data-driven “proxy mean testing plus” (PMT+) targeting approach compare in terms of social cohesion, community satisfaction, and women’s agency, with respect to a committee-based (CB) approach?


      c. Does the overall effectiveness of an aid program in a fragile setting differ based on the targeting approach used?


      d. Which targeting approach is faster or more cost-effective?