EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report focuses on an evaluation of Income Generating Activities (IGA) that accompanied rental subsidy programs in Haiti between 2013 and 2016. The original objectives were:
Evaluate the impact of supplemental support on the economic situation of house-holds.
Evaluate different livelihoods approaches from a quality/cost/effectiveness point of view in order to improve program performance based on lessons learned and ac-countability.
Feed into current reflection process of parties concerned with sustainable livelihood approaches.
To accomplish the preceding, the consultants reviewed reports for humanitarian organizations that provided rental subsidies, conducted 10 focus groups with beneficiaries and aid workers, and surveyed a sample of 1,399 rental subsidy beneficiaries, 1,057 of whom had received some configuration of cash and 1,005 of whom had received some form of training focusing on management of domestic budget, small business and trade strategies, adult literacy, and employment. The most significant conclusions of the report are summarized below. But first, some caveats regarding the statistical comparison of the different aid packages are in order.
Caveats
Any comparative study of the efficacy of the training, or costs—whether from this report or any other report—must be made cautiously. The aid agencies used differential beneficiary criteria, different means of selecting and verifying beneficiaries, different training strategies, and in different geographical areas that had widely varied levels of urbanization and crime. All the preceding was applied by different staff with unknown competence levels and different pay incentives. No strategy was randomly applied to the beneficiary population. In some cases, the agencies used Proxy Means Tests to select beneficiaries (e.g., Concern), in other cases they used surveys and basic indicators (e.g., Oxfam), in others they used selection committees (e.g., IOM), and in other cases beneficiaries self-selected themselves (e.g., Goal and CARE). The different organizations also accompanied the interventions with different support services, including a wide array of counselling, medical care, and referrals to other agencies for additional assistance. Some provided child care during training. Others did not. The duration of similar trainings varied widely between the organizations and sometimes within the same organization. Goal, for example, reported giving the same information to beneficiaries in six, two-hour training sessions delivered over a period of seven weeks as they did in 11, two-hour training sessions delivered over a period of 12 weeks. Nor did the duration of training that staff reported giving always jibe with that described in reports. All of preceding makes it difficult to compare the impact of differential training regimes.
Having noted the previous caveats, all is not lost. We can and in this report do make useful comparisons between the beneficiaries that received training from different agencies versus those that received no training at all; and we evaluate the impact on economic status of different levels of financial assistance. These two tasks are the topic of th e main report. We can also draw on Information from the 1,399 respondent quantitative questionnaire and the 10 fully transcribed focus groups to gain insight from an examination of overall impact of the aid (reports for both are also provided in the annex).