Introduction From November 2005 until December 2006, the Ministry of the family in Nicaragua (MIFAMILIA) implemented a pilot program in 6 municipalities of the drought region in the northern part of the country which had been affected by a severe drought shock in the previous year. Drought is a recurring phenomenon in Nicaragua, affecting many poor communities in the North and Pacific regions whose livelihoods mainly depend on rain-fed agriculture, in particular cultivation of subsistence crops. |
Pilot objectives 
| | | Short-run safety net: Reduce the impact of aggregate shocks on human and physical capital investments by decreasing the need for ex-post, adverse coping mechanisms (such as asset sales, taking children out of school, temporary nutrition deficiencies in early childhood/pregnancies) through cash transfers. |
Long run upward mobility and poverty reduction through asset creation: Enhance households’ asset base and income diversification capacity and reduce poverty by strengthening households’ ex-ante risk management strategies that aim at improving human and physical capital accumulation, thus reducing short and long-run vulnerabilities to shocks (e.g. exposure to drought) in a sustainable way.
Program components Building on the already existing and successful conditional cash transfer model (Red de Proteccion Social), the program introduced 3 different “packages” in order to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of each to reach the objectives stated above. Specifically, a total of 3000 beneficiary households were selected among the poor and vulnerable households to participate in the program and were allocated one of three interventions through a participatory lottery: 
(i) a conditional cash transfer (ii) a conditional cash transfer plus a scholarship that allowed one of the household members to participate in a vocational training course (iii) a conditional cash transfer plus a productive investment grant, aimed at encouraging recipients to start a small non-agricultural activity A key feature of the pilot program was that an experimental evaluation framework was directly integrated in the program during the design phase. The goal of this web site is to present the results of the quantitative and qualitative evaluation activities that are currently underway. These results will be disseminated as they become available. For additional information on this pilot in Spanish please click here. | 
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