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.