Overcoming Poverty Collectively: Can Community Facilitation Improve the Efficacy of Cash Transfers?

This research project intends to study the effect of community-driven development compared to a program that provides cash directly to households. It will also explore if community facilitation and training improve the effectiveness of cash transfers. 

Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP) is a community-driven development model where communities receive community-level grants as well as training in developing a proposal and plan for a project financed by the grant. The researchers will partner with Spark Microgrants, an NGO which provides FCAP. Spark’s FCAP model is intended to increase the effectiveness of a one-time investment by enhancing project management capacity, establishing savings groups, and providing each community grant ~ USD 8,000 to finance cash generating investments like vegetable or livestock farming or providing local public goods like school expansion/renovation. 

The researchers and Spark plan to explore an evaluation in Malawi that compares three types of interventions: FCAP, FCAP plus household grants, and household grants alone. This will evaluate whether the FCAP model is more effective in sustaining impacts than direct cash grants and whether the combination of FCAP and cash grants is more effective than either transfer alone.