Spark Microgrants — RCT Workshop (June 2024)

Note: This page summarizes the rationale behind a GiveWell grant to Spark Microgrants. Spark Microgrants staff reviewed this page prior to publication.

Published: August 2024

In June 2024, GiveWell recommended a $20,000 grant to Spark Microgrants to support a two-day planning workshop for a potential randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Spark’s Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP). FCAP provides communities with village-level cash transfers, within a process of community engagement that includes "collective visioning" (helping communities to develop specific objectives), project management skill building, and technical advisor training ("facilitation").1 Spark’s facilitation is designed to support villages in using the cash transfers for a specific development project of their choice.2 We think it is plausible that Spark’s program could look significantly more cost-effective than cash transfers alone, since Spark’s facilitation may increase the likelihood that the transfers are directed towards projects that lead to sustained increases in individuals’ income and consumption.

This grant supported Spark in hosting a two-day design workshop in Washington, DC, in June 2024 for a potential RCT of its program, which Spark tentatively plans to launch in late 2025. The goal of the workshop was to discuss the highest-priority research questions pertaining to FCAP, and to brainstorm potential study designs that would convincingly answer those questions. Participants included Spark’s leadership, the principal investigators of the study, GiveWell, and another potential funder of the RCT.

We are interested in this RCT because we’re interested in generating rigorous evidence of Spark’s FCAP model on household consumption, and because the current proposed study design would allow us to separate out the impact of the community cash transfer from the impact of Spark’s facilitation, as well as measure the effect of a subsequent household cash transfer distributed after the community facilitation process.3 We think this is potentially highly valuable, because we think that finding ways to amplify the effects of cash transfers represents a promising avenue for research on cost-effective "livelihoods" programs (which are primarily focused on increasing income and consumption.)

We recommended this grant on the basis that we felt it was responsible funding behavior to contribute to Spark’s investment in generating evidence that we are interested in, and because we felt the workshop would be a productive way to learn more about this RCT.

Our primary reservations are that (i) we may not fund the resulting RCT if we think it is unlikely to meaningfully change our funding behavior or inform our understanding of FCAP’s cost-effectiveness, and that (ii) we assume that Spark would have drawn on its own unrestricted funding to fully fund the workshop itself had we not contributed to it, in which case the workshop would have happened anyway. We see this grant as valuable not for its counterfactual impact, but as a contribution to Spark’s operating costs commensurate with our interest in this activity as a funder.

We recommended this grant after a light-touch investigation, similar to our process for small discretionary grantmaking. Two people involved in the workshop are also on GiveWell’s Research Council: James Habyarimana is one of the study’s principal investigators, and Laliteswar Kumar was formerly co-CEO of Spark. To mitigate these potential conflicts of interest, we did not speak to either Professor Habyarimana or Mr. Kumar when we evaluated this grant.

Following the workshop, we plan to keep in close contact with Spark as the plans for this RCT develop, and potentially further investigate whether we should fund this RCT directly.

Sources

• 1

  This is in keeping with the process described here: Spark Microgrants, "The Spark Process"

  • “The foundation is the Spark's Facilitated Collective Action Process ("the Spark Process"), where communities are led through weekly meetings and trainings to organize, conceptualize and implement their chosen project and receive a microgrant to fund it.”
  • “During Technical Advisor Review, communities: Receive training from a technical advisor, an outside specialist who is able to give expert judgment for the risk assessment and operational functionality of a specific project.”

• 2

  “The FCAP has seven phases:
  Year 1

  1. Community building: Communities will set expectations between Spark and the community, develop a mission and vision, conduct resource analysis and mapping, and elect a leadership committee
  2. Goal setting: Communities will brainstorm and prioritize communal goals, develop objectives for reaching the top goal, research existing efforts to address each objective, and identify a pathway to the objective
  3. Proposal development: Communities will develop metrics for project success, create an operational plan and budget, complete a risk assessment, and draft bylaws and a sustainability plan
  4. Technical advisor: Communities receive training from a technical advisor (an outside specialist who is able to give expert judgment for the risk assessment and operational functionality of a specific project) and revise the proposal to create a strong, quality project plan
  5. Implementation: Communities receive the first installment of the micro-grant from Spark, enroll community members in our SMS program so they can be alerted in real time when grant disbursements are made via text message, and launch their project

  Year 2

  1. Second-year village planning: Communities engage in bi-monthly meetings to discuss the status of their project and its operations during the second year, and receive the second installment of the grant
  2. Future envisioning and transition towards self-reliance: Communities develop a post-Spark community plan and updated vision; build partnerships with local government, NGOs and businesses; and independently manage their project.” Spark Microgrants, Malawi Evaluation Design Workplan (unpublished)

• 3
  • “We’re also interested in doing a cash benchmarking exercise, where households are given a cash transfer similar to the total per-household cost of delivering the FCAP. This will help us assess the degree to which the facilitation process delivers additional value beyond the direct monetary cost of program implementation.” Spark Microgrants, Malawi Evaluation Design Workplan (unpublished)
  • “We’ll carry out a four-arm study comparing different programming variations to each other, as follows [...] FCAP + CT: Standard model + an additional household-level lump-sum cash transfer (CT) … delivered after the facilitation period.” Spark Microgrants, Malawi Evaluation Design Workplan (unpublished)