Published 2020
“…Recent policy debates have focused renewed international attention on poultry as an asset that is widely accessible to women and has low start-up costs, increasing its potential to have significant positive welfare effects for poor households in developing countries. In 2016,
Bill Gates promoted investment in chickens as a development strategy that would meaningfully increase incomes for poor women.1 In response, Chris Blattman suggested that large cash grants of the kind provided by Give Directly (Haushofer and Shapiro 2016) may be more effective at enhancing outcomes, given heterogeneity in households’ needs and capacity to raise chickens.2 This learning brief reports on evidence from an ongoing impact evaluation of a complementary program to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program, Phase 4 (PSNP4), called SPIR (Strengthen PSNP4 Institutions and Resilience) in rural Ethiopia, in which a cross-randomization of interventions providing poultry and cash transfers allows us to generate evidence highly relevant to this debate. …”
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