Designing Cash Transfer and Productive Inclusion Programs in Guinea

Policymakers are increasingly interested in complementing cash transfer programs with interventions that can help poor households create sustainable livelihoods. When added to cash transfers, productive inclusion interventions—including savings groups, business training, and a lump-sum grant—increase household consumption, business investments, and revenue (Bossuroy et al., 2022). The Government of Guinea is adapting these successful interventions as part of their national social safety nets program, which will provide 136,000 households with regular cash transfers for two years, and 15,000 households with productive inclusion interventions. The first goal of this project is to provide technical support to the Government in designing and executing the productive inclusion interventions to ensure that they maintain the program features that drove positive impacts in other contexts. The second goal is to conduct a randomized evaluation to test whether providing productive inclusion interventions without regular cash transfers can be impactful, and how these impacts compare to (1) providing only regular cash transfers, (2) providing regular cash transfers and productive inclusion interventions jointly. Determining the separate and additive effects of regular transfers and productive inclusion interventions will inform the Government’s future investments in either type of support. To help inform this decision, a detailed cost analysis will also be conducted.