Human Development Cash Transfer Program Impact Evaluation [Madagascar] (2017+)

ideas42 is partnering with the World Bank’s Madagascar Social Protection Team to support the Government of Madagascar in designing and implementing a rigorous impact evaluation that meets its policy needs by clarifying the effectiveness of the HDCT program. An important focus of the evaluation is in piloting certain community participation, behavioral science, and motivational interventions that may improve the effectiveness of the program and help guide its ultimate scalability. Data sources for the evaluation include:

1. A Proxy Means Test (PMT) in all the intervention areas that will identify only households in the bottom 30th percentile of income that have children ages 0-10 as eligible
2. Administrative data, including school attendance, collected by the Madagascar Ministry of Education
3. Baseline, Midline and Endline Household Surveys measuring household consumption, assets, parenting behaviors, child educational development, and other key outcome measures before, during, and after the program
4. Child Development Assessments using the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool (MDAT), which was designed for an African context and further adapted to the Malagasy context.

The purpose of the baseline survey is to collect pre-HDCT measures on outcomes of interest (e.g., household consumption, parenting behaviors, household assets, child cognitive development) and to verify balanced randomization of subjects across all intervention groups. Results from the baseline survey will be compared to the findings from the midline and endline surveys (which will be conducted after households begin receiving the transfers) to determine how the outcomes of interest change by virtue of the transfer.

The mid-term survey methodology. It consists in a representative survey which includes two components: a household survey and an administration of a test, called MDAT, for children aged from 24 to 71 months old. The sampling method, the different parts of the household questionnaire, the MDAT test, and the different concepts of the mid-term survey were kept identical to those of the baseline survey, except some minor changes on the household questionnaire in order to keep a certain harmonization with the FIAVOTA questionnaire.

Sample size for the mid-term survey was 6006 households, comprising 1522 additional households, distributed among 925 beneficiary households and 597 control households. It is important to stress that these additional households were drawn from the same fokontany (primary unit) as for the baseline survey. For the MDAT test, sampled children were randomly drawn from an exhaustive list of eligible children (aged from 24 to 71 months old) identified within the sample of household.