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.

Stage 1: Community randomization

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. Before the lottery, all communities in the 6 municipalities had been grouped in pairs based on similarity in road access, infrastructure, (micro-) climate, crop mix, and proximity. Through the lottery, one community of each pair was randomly selected as a treatment community, the other as control. In case of uneven number of communities, a “pair” consisted of the largest community and the combination of the two other communities. The identification of communities and community pairs was based on maps and discussions with municipality technical personnel. This also revealed that communities tend to be geographically separated from each other, which reduces the potential for possible spillover effects from the treatment on the control communities.

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. Based on the discussions with leaders, 3.72% of all the households considered were re-assigned from non-eligible to eligible, and 3.65% from eligible to non-eligible. To avoid any possible selection bias resulting from the re-assignment by the leaders, the evaluation analyses use intent-to treat estimates, using the intent-to-treat as defined by the proxy means methodology.

Stage 2: Household randomization in the three pilot components

Finally, from each eligible household, the female household member that was reported as the primary caregiver was invited to a registration assembly. If there were more than 30 eligible households in a community, several assemblies were organized at the same time, and households were assigned to one of the assemblies based on the geographic location of their house. 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 components were randomly allocated among the eligible households.

[Go back to main page]