 All right, so thank you everyone. My name is Hayford Mansa Ayracwa. So Ayracwa is a surname. That's why it's here I'm with the University of Ghana and more recently with Lund University in Sweden, doing my PhD. I have been working with a unit of the Investicle Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research, ISSA, which primary goal is to do a lot of social economic related research to influence policy both in Ghana and Africa. I've been privileged to be part of this cash transfer evaluation and so I present to you an aspect of a broader evaluation that we did last year and which we ended this year. And so all right, so as we can see the topic I'm looking at impact of cash transfer house, impact of cash transfers on household consumption expenditures. The Ghana government started this cash transfer program in 2008 as a pilot program and the whole objective was to help extremely poor households. Of course, we have this GLS S5 which is Ghana Livingston S7 which is done over time and the fifth one of course classifies some group of people as extremely poor. So the target of this program is looking at extremely poor, bottom 20% of the extremely poor households. And so to do this at the same time when we're thinking about this program, the Yale University in collaboration with the University of Ghana, specifically my unit, were considering a panel survey and so we decided to build this into the whole program to allow for the evaluation process and to be enrolled or to get part of this program, what the condition were to first of all, there were a whole lot of conditions, but the target was to target people who were extremely disadvantaged, for example, people with severe disabilities and have had no working capability, people, children, OVCs, we also had in mind the aged with no productive capacity among several other conditions. The objective for getting these people into the cash transfer program was to help them, you know, in the short run to smoothen their consumption, but of course in the long run we were looking at the opportunity for them building human capital that would enable them to be able to effectively take part in day-to-day activities in the economy. Now, how do we go about this whole thing? I already mentioned that we did this at the same time when Yeo and Issa were trying to do start their panel data and so a pilot started in 2008 and originally we had sampled 700 beneficiaries in some districts across the country and so these districts were kept as our treated community and after the baseline we of course rode out the program for them and at the same time Yeo also took their baseline in the same year and so in 2012 when we have to go back to the same to do our evaluation we had to do a matching of the people in the yield sample that matched our sample in the LEAP communities so that we're able to get a equally a balanced sample to be able to do any useful assessment, impact assessment. Now what happened the interesting thing we found was that you know at the time of follow-up we realized that some of the households that we had airmarked as a control because of their condition of course this is politically also you know in a part of the world in my country your sustainability in office depends on what people are seeing and so sometimes governments want to also roll out things quickly to let people know that we are about do we are making some impact and so some of the control groups had been rolled up onto the LEAP or had been scaled up onto the LEAP so in analysis we try to regroup them just so that we don't buy us our work of course with the panel data of the sort we the literature gives a clear direction of what to do and the DID has featured prominently the difference in difference analysis has featured prominently in analysis of this nature And so that is what we adopted to look at that now This is just some extracts from the results and some summary of the key findings that I want to show to you The consumption of course which is the objective of the program to smooth in consumption So question is is it really helping improve in the consumption and of course if it's improving consumption What are the sort of things that people are consuming is that statue base is that so my point was whether or not We haven't a more balanced meal at the household level than it used to be in the past and so I try to Disaggregate consumption into different components and now you have your serious nuts bread fast and all spices protein fruits staples confectionery beverages restaurant among other things and Pretty interesting. Of course, we see spell with regards to protein a sharp something here, but a test of Mees show that there is no significant difference between the treatment and control group at the baseline So this is at a baseline just to show that the people we are trying to look at of course are much They are comparable in the first place So this basically gives us that assurance that things are okay now when we apply the the model The difference in difference application. We realize that overall The beneficiary households seem to have had a sharp reduction in the expenditure regards to consumption and Was really striking because we're expecting otherwise And I'll tell you soon why this happened We also realized that there was no impact on protein related foods fats and most of the indicators that we thought that once we are getting some Assistance we expect an improvement in some of these indicators rather. We're not finding any significant thing there again for me was striking what is happening and Observed a negative impact on expenditures on cereals beverages and spices So the results really don't look too good from the reset a point of view and of course within poor policy point of view However Something interesting what we tried to find out was whether or not proud to the program Where beneficiary households depending on say own produce? for their consumption or They were relying on remittances from other people for consumption Or after the initiative are they now depending a lot more on purchases Than you know and we live in a the culture setting is such that once everybody knows that you are really poor society or other households tend to have some Some concern for you and would want to extend a helping hand when they need arises but immediately you are mapped and said that you are part of this initiative obviously people step back and So we realized that some of these things were into playing And so we saw that now there was a bit more a switch from own produce which used to be the case at a time of rolling on to the program to consumption that was now dependent on you know purchases Now what we realized to be driving this result as I conclude is that for most of these beneficiary households as I mentioned earlier the Benefits or their remittances were not coming and other people were not helping but unfortunately the Transfers were not coming regularly as they should have come for example in a situation for example in 2011 2012 up to about eight months beneficiary households had not received their Subventions and of course you don't expect them to consume if they cannot get the money to consume and also That's social protection assistance that we're getting from community and family relations had also gone away So again, this is what we so the major recommendation out of this work. I seem to be projecting is that Transfers to beneficiary households should be consistent to smoothing consumption as the program objective wants to do. Thank you