JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In Liberia, the government is helping families in extreme poverty by giving them cash, typically to one family member. Researchers tested whether getting couples to make financial plans together can improve the benefits of cash aid and lower household tensions. As NPR's Fatma Tanis reports, the results were mixed.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: Aurelius Butler runs the national social protection program for the Liberian government.
AURELIUS BUTLER: We're trying to find a way to elevate the poorest of the poor.
TANIS: Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and cash transfers have been going on for more than a decade, Butler says. Studies show the benefits of cash aid are felt by the entire household, even if it's given to an individual.
BUTLER: One of our key design components is that we target the female most responsible for household spending.
TANIS: These initiatives give women the money because they're often left out of decision-making that affects them. But not everyone was happy about the setup, Butler says.
BUTLER: A lot of the men reported that they felt like they were being excluded.
TANIS: So this new experiment worked on giving both partners in a household equal amounts of money. Sarika Gupta is a senior economist at the World Bank. She says the research also looked at how it affects intimate partner violence, which in Liberia is higher than the world average. And while studies show that cash transfers do not increase intimate partner violence, the researchers wanted to see if they could help families generate more income and reduce tensions.
SARIKA GUPTA: We know that we're giving money to households. We want them to optimize how they spend it while also trying to potentially minimize household conflict.
TANIS: To make sure partners shared in decision-making, the Liberian government partnered with the World Bank and the nonprofit GiveDirectly and added a financial planning element to the cash transfer, which meant the couples had to discuss their spending priorities.
GUPTA: But we also want women's voices to be heard, so maybe joint planning is important rather than individual planning.
TANIS: In 2022, more than 2,300 households in the Maryland and Bomi counties of Liberia received $750 in four installments. About half of those families also received financial planning.
BUTLER: We sit down with the couple for about 45 minutes and we go ahead and we ask them - themselves - to detail their plan.
TANIS: Gupta and other researchers followed the households for a year after they received the cash. The results showed some benefits they'd hoped to see.
GUPTA: Households that received the planning actually were statistically even more better off economically than households who received only the cash transfer.
TANIS: For example, Christian, who only released her first name for the program. She used her cash to pay school fees for her five kids, buy rice for the house and pay off their debt. Her husband used his money to buy solar light bulbs and cement to patch their leaking roof. On average, the researchers did not see evidence that intimate partner violence had increased either among couples who had the planning or those who did not. But then they looked a bit deeper at couples who were previously determined to be at high risk for violence based on history.
GUPTA: We found that they actually saw an increase in intimate partner violence only if they were in the cash-plus-planning arm.
TANIS: In other words, if there had been previous incidents of domestic violence in the family, it increased only with the joint planning group. Amber Peterman studies the impact of development programs at UNICEF and was not involved in this research. She has an idea about why this kind of violence might have increased.
AMBER PETERMAN: It is quite clear that it's something in the shift about couples deciding together and then perhaps deviations from that decision creating these additional conflicts.
TANIS: As in, tensions might have occurred if one partner deviates from a plan they both committed to. Peterman says she looks forward to more research on the precise cause. For Aurelius Butler with the Liberian government, the findings offer a chance to build better programs for families.
Fatma Tanis, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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