Long Term Effects Of a Maternal Cash Transfer Experiment

RanD

Status: Active, not recruiting

Conditions: Maternal Health Services; Outcome Assessment

Treatments: Behavioral: Cash transfer in prior study

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05709457

R01HD102412

Details and patient eligibility

About

This is a follow-on study to a cluster randomized trial of maternal conditional incentives conducted in Nigeria. This study found that cash transfers, conditional on women obtaining facility-based prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care, resulted in large, significant effects on maternal and child outcomes (NICHD R01HD083444). This study will answer additional key policy questions. First, are the effects on maternal behavior temporary, or do they result in more sustained behavior change? Second, do measured short run (SR) child health effects persist over the long run? Third, did the program generate spillovers?

Full description

This study will build on what the study investigators learned from the RCT and extend it in novel directions. Research assistants will return to the study communities approximately 5 years after enrollment in the RCT to collect data on utilization of maternal health care services for births to the trial participants after the intervention, and on long run child health outcomes including child weight and height. The research assistants will also collect data on the birth outcomes of non-incentivized childbearing women in the study clusters. Data will be collected through in-person surveys of study participants.

This study will provide valuable new evidence about the indirect and long run effects of demand-side incentives. This is of critical importance because accounting for only the direct effects may severely underestimate the full effect of the program.

Enrollment: 21,000 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 13 to 60 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria for Households:

• Resident in a community included in the RTC

Exclusion Criteria for Households:

• None

Inclusion Criteria for Women:

• Women must have participated in an earlier randomized trial of conditional incentives OR
• They did not take part in the earlier trial but are resident in clusters that participated in the earlier trial and have given birth since 2018

Exclusion Criteria for Women:

-

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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21,000 participants in 2 patient groups

RCT Participants

Experimental group

Description:

Women and children who participated in the earlier study.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Cash transfer in prior study

Non-RCT participants

No Intervention group

Description:

Women and children in the same communities included in the earlier study who did not participate in that study.