Municipality selection

The program was targeted to 6 municipalities of the drought region in the Northwest of Nicaragua. These were municipalities that met both criteria of having been affected by a drought the previous year and by the high prevalence of extreme rural poverty based on the national poverty map.

Community selection

From the list of all communities in the 6 municipalities, 56 intervention and 50 control communities were randomly selected through a lottery to which the mayors of the 6 municipalities were invited to attend and participate.

Household eligibility

Baseline data were then used to define program eligibility based on poverty and vulnerability, resulting in the identification of 3000 households eligible to participate in the program. The eligibility criteria were determined using the proxy means methodology developed for the RPS and based on the national household data from 2001 (EMNV). Additional discussions with local leaders from each intervention community were conducted to identify possible exclusion or inclusions errors. Based on this, the list of eligible households was finalized.

Allocation of the three packages

Finally, from each eligible household, the female household member that was reported as the primary caregiver was invited to a registration assembly. During the assemblies, the program objectives and its various components were explained. At the very end of each assembly, all the beneficiaries participated in a lottery process through which the 3 program packages were randomly allocated among the eligible households.

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