Road Maintenance Group (RMG) is a part of PRF supporting with funding by WB&SDC, the impact evaluation had been done in early 2020, to continue the work, the Online meeting on discussion of a draft paper analyzing village head on targeting in the context of the PRF’s Laos Road Maintenance Groups program was held August 28 2020. This meeting was attended by WB (World Bank team, RMG impact evaluation team, PRF team and concerned sectors consulted on Village heads played a key role in updating poverty rankings to identify poorer beneficiaries for the program. The paper compares the effectiveness of targeting by village heads with selection based on a proxy means test (PMT) and sheds light on the criteria and information that village heads use to select beneficiaries. The results suggest beneficiaries were significantly worse off compared to a random sample, and village heads seem to prioritize the poor within their villages as effectively as a PMT-based selection. They do so by relying on a combination of easily observable household characteristics, forming a holistic impression of household welfare, rather than specific indicators like actual land ownership, nutrition or economic shocks.
