Who gets what? Budgets and discretion in community-led social protection targeting

By Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, Daniel Gilligan, Kibrom Tafere, and Alemayehu Seyoum TaffesseOctober 22, 2026

Key takeaways

• An experiment in 180 Ethiopian communities tested how local leaders allocate social assistance. Researchers varied budgets and targeting rules to see who received support and how funds were distributed.
• When budgets were cut, leaders reduced payment size rather than coverage. Most households still received assistance, but transfer amounts fell sharply as leaders spread limited funds more widely.
• Giving leaders more discretion improved targeting. Flexible selection criteria helped them reach poorer and conflict-affected households that fixed rules were more likely to miss.

Republished with permission from VoxDev.

Shrinking humanitarian and international development assistance funding amid growing global crises has strained the operations of governments and humanitarian organizations. With the global humanitarian funding gap reaching $30 billion in 2025 (UN OCHA 2025), efficiency in the targeting of beneficiaries for social and humanitarian assistance is paramount. Under these conditions, downstream decisions will reflect trade-offs between program coverage (the number of beneficiaries) and depth (benefit size). Variations in available resources and discretion in beneficiary selection could shape how community leaders behave and manage these trade-offs. 

Where dynamic administrative and social registries are scarce, governments and aid agencies often rely on community leaders to target program beneficiaries. Community-based targeting (CBT) draws on local information that standard survey-based approaches may miss to identify vulnerable households. But CBT also raises familiar concerns about favoritism and elite capture (Coady et al. 2004, Alatas et al. 2012). 

Read More Here