Nahouri Cash Transfers Pilot Project (NCTPP)
The Nahouri Cash Transfers Pilot Project (NCTPP) was a two-year (2008-2010) randomized cash transfer experiment run in 75 villages of Nahouri province, rural Burkina Faso, comparing conditional and unconditional cash transfers paid quarterly to either the mother or father in poor households. It was designed and evaluated by World Bank, University of Illinois, and Oklahoma State University researchers in partnership with Burkina Faso's government, and funded through World Bank trust funds and the NBER Africa Project. The pilot tested effects on child school enrollment/attendance and preventive health clinic visits for children under seven. It has since concluded and was not continued as an ongoing program.
Randomized controlled trial, Conditional vs. unconditional cash transfer, Mother vs. father recipient, Education, Child health, Rural Africa, West Africa, Nahouri province
Headquarters
- Organization Name
- World Bank (Development Research Group), in partnership with the Government of Burkina Faso
- City
- Washington
- State / Province
- District of Columbia
- Country
- United States
Contact
- Website
- https://www.worldbank.org/
Status & Funding
- Organization status
- Active
- Program status
- Inactive
- Application status
- Timed
- Number of recipients
- 2,160
- Funding type
- Government, Research Pilot
Benefits
- Currency Type
- Fiat
- Payment frequency
- Variable
- How long the program lasts
- 24 months
- Distribution Type
- Cash
- Benefit details
Households received a quarterly per-child stipend in physical cash, distributed at a central village location away from the school by a government-trained village committee (not linked visibly to school premises). Amounts varied by child age: 4,000 FCFA/year (~$8.80) for children under 7, 8,000 FCFA/year (~$17.60) for children 7-10 (grades 1-4), and 16,000 FCFA/year (~$35.20) for children 11-15 (grade 5+), totaling about 10.4% of household per-capita expenditure. In conditional (CCT) villages, payment required verified school attendance >=90%/quarter (first-quarter payment required enrollment only) or quarterly child-growth-monitoring clinic visits for under-7s, tracked via program booklets audited against school/clinic registers; unconditional (UCT) villages had no such requirements. The first payment was delayed until Nov/Dec 2008 due to government logistics, after the Oct 1, 2008 school year start.
Eligibility
Overview
- Eligibility details
Poor rural households in one of 75 villages (each with a primary school) in Nahouri province, southern Burkina Faso, roughly 100 miles from Ouagadougou. Poverty status was determined via a pre-baseline household census (housing, assets like plow/cart/draft animals/motorcycle/radio, education, cotton farming, market access) matched against a national poverty line using Burkina Faso's 2003 household living conditions survey. Only households with children present at the baseline survey were eligible (to avoid child fostering distortions), with health-arm conditionality applying to children under 7 and education-arm conditionality applying to children 7-15.
Demographics
- Minimum age
- 0
- Maximum age
- 15
- Education level
- Elementary, Middle School
Family
- Family Status
- Parent
- Number of dependents (minimum)
- 1
Financial
- Employment status
- Self-Employed
- Banked status
- Unbanked
Geography
- Countries covered
- Burkina Faso
- Counties covered
- Nahouri Province
- Residency of Target Geography
- Yes
Participation
- Research / data sharing
- Required
- Complementary program enrollment required
- School enrollment/attendance verification and quarterly child health-clinic growth monitoring were required for payment in the conditional (CCT) arms only, no such requirement in the unconditional (UCT) arms.
- Research / participation requirements
The pilot was itself a research study led by Richard Akresh (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Damien de Walque (World Bank), and Harounan Kazianga (Oklahoma State University), with IRB approval from the University of Illinois and Burkina Faso's national ethics committee. Data collection included a baseline census, baseline household survey (June 2008), and two follow-up surveys (June 2009 and June 2010) covering about 2,629 households, plus Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices cognitive tests for children and cross-checks of self-reported enrollment/attendance against school and health-clinic administrative registers. Findings were published as World Bank Policy Research Working Papers 6340 and 7730 and NBER Working Paper 17785, and in peer-reviewed journals. Key findings: conditional transfers (CCTs) significantly outperformed unconditional transfers (UCTs) at raising school enrollment for 'marginal' children (girls, younger children, lower-ability children - e.g., +20.3% for girls, +37.3% for younger children, +36.2% for lower-ability children), while CCTs and UCTs had similar effects on enrollment of 'non-marginal' children (boys, older children, higher-ability children already favored by parents).
Application Process
- How to apply
There was no public application process. Prior to the baseline survey, researchers and government partners conducted a household census in all 75 Nahouri villages, computed a proxy-means poverty score for each household benchmarked against the national poverty line, and directly enrolled eligible poor households with resident children in villages that had been randomly assigned to a treatment arm.
- Selection process
Villages were randomly assigned by lottery to one of five groups (15 villages each): conditional transfer to father, conditional transfer to mother, unconditional transfer to father, unconditional transfer to mother, or control (no transfer). Within treatment villages, poor households (identified via the pre-baseline census and proxy-means poverty score) were randomly selected to receive transfers - about 540 households per treatment arm (2,160 total) and 615 control households, drawn from a total sample of roughly 2,629 households across all arms.
