PROPELLING SOCIAL INCLUSION
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BOX 7.7
Positive Spillovers of Social Protection Programs: The Case of Nicaragua In their study on the impact of social protection in Nicaragua, Macours and Vakis (2009) find that the aspirations of participants in a social protection program were enhanced through social interactions with successful and experienced individuals, which in turn positively influenced the attitudes and behaviors of the people surrounding them. The authors studied a two-stage randomized short-term transfer program in Nicaragua that randomly allocated 3,000 households to one of three conditional cash transfer packages as part of the Atención a Crisis program implemented by the Ministry of the Family. The first package was a basic conditional cash transfer aimed at protecting investments in human capital. The second package also included a scholarship component for occupational training. The third package consisted of the basic package plus a special grant for productive investments. The design of the program created opportunities to enhance interactions among beneficiaries, particularly women, who were the recipients of the cash transfers and were given a leading role in the implementation of different components of the program. The evaluation focused on the additional impact of the program (that is, the impact above being assigned to the treatment group) on beneficiaries who lived near female leaders who received the productive investment package. The female leaders were generally younger and more educated than the average beneficiary; they were required to develop a business development plan outlining the objectives of their business initiatives and investments in new livestock or nonagricultural income-generating activities. These requirements were supported through technical assistance and business-skills training workshops. Source: Macours and Vakis 2009.
development projects. Recent evidence on the impact of such programs suggests that when implemented well, they can improve service delivery in sectors such as health and education, increase resource sustainability, and help communities build lower-cost and better-quality infrastructure (Wong 2012; Mansuri and Rao 2013). Furthermore, by virtue of targeting mostly the poor and vulnerable, these programs can help bring the voice of such groups to the policy table. An impact evaluation of Indonesia’s Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), for instance, finds widespread participation of beneficiaries in program meetings, with poorer and female-headed households as likely to attend as others (Barron et al. 2009).