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Payment Mechanisms and Antipoverty Programs: Evidence from a Mobile Money Cash Transfer Experiment in Niger

Tufts University and International Food Policy Research InstituteRelief International, the PhilippinesInternational Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent SocietiesIrish Aid Ethiopia

We thank Concern Worldwide in Niger for their support in all stages of this project and would especially like to thank Adamou Hamadou and the data collection team in Niger. We greatly appreciate comments from Randall Akee, Steven Block, Simone di Castri, Pascaline Dupas, Frederico Finan, Alain de Janvry, Kelsey Jack, Robert Jensen, Charles Kenny, Stephan Klasen, Alan Gelb, Jessica Goldberg, Christopher Ksoll, Jake Kendall, Jeremy Magruder, Craig McIntosh, Pau, Julie Schaffner, Gabrielle Smith, Tavneet Suri, Frank-Borge Wietzke, and participants at seminars at the Center for Global Development, University of California, Berkeley, MWIDC, University of California, Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Irvine, University of Southern California, and the University of Gottingen. We are grateful for financial support from the European Commission, Irish Aid, the Hitachi Center, and Tufts University. All errors are our own.

Cash transfers have become an increasingly important component of social protection policies in both developed and developing countries. While such programs are often implemented electronically in developed countries, in many developing countries with weak financial infrastructure, such transfers are distributed manually, resulting in significant costs to program recipients and the public sector alike. The introduction of mobile money systems in many developing countries offers new opportunities for distributing cash transfers. Using data from a randomized experiment of a mobile money cash transfer program in Niger, we find evidence of benefits of this new system: household diet diversity was 9%–16% higher among households who received mobile transfers, and children ate an additional one-third of a meal per day. These results can be partially attributed to time savings associated with mobile transfers, as program recipients spent less time traveling to and waiting for their transfer. They are also associated with shifts in intrahousehold bargaining power for women. These results suggest that electronic transfers may address key logistical challenges in implementing cash transfer programs in developing countries but that sufficient investment in the payments infrastructure is needed.