How well do social protection programs reach the poorest? We assess Ghana's LEAP program and show that community-based targeting may outperform proxy-based methods when evaluated against a marginal-utility benchmark.

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Abstract

We propose an alternative benchmark for evaluating the targeting accuracy of social protection programs based on the marginal utility of expenditure. Using this benchmark, we assess the targeting performance of Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program. We find that community-based targeting may yield more accurate targeting outcomes than proxy-based methods under a marginal-utility benchmark, because the latter better captures the welfare losses from poverty that standard consumption-based measures can miss.

BibTeX

@InCollection{	  trachtman-ligon25,
  author	= {Carly Trachtman and Ethan Ligon},
  title		= {Assessing Targeting Performance: The Case of {Ghana's}
                {LEAP} Program},
  booktitle	= {Targeting the Poor},
  editor	= {Tauhidur Rahman and Fabrizio Felloni and Indran Naidoo},
  year		= 2025,
  note		= {In press},
  url		= {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zk0m608}
}