First, we articulated efforts and cooperation with the Ministry of Social Development, to get access to their administrative records of the national direct money transfers program Tekopora. This provided us with a database of all the beneficiaries of the program. On this database, we filtered out all the households that were outside the urban and peri-urban area areas of the municipality of San Juan Nepomuceno, the territory we selected for the experiment. Second, we organized a mapping collaboration session with social workers that work with families in the Tekopora program. Together with them, we mapped each of the households in the database into a physical map that was later digitalized. Third, we used census data to complete our georeferenced household’s database with households that are not from the Tekopora program but are within the urban and peri-urban areas of the same municipality. With this database, we then proceeded to randomly select our sample of participant households using QGis software algorithms to randomize city blocks first, and households within city blocks second, both to select participants, and then randomly assign treatment in a second stage. For the group of selected households without members participating in social programs, we conducted a socioeconomic characterization survey at the beginning of the experiment to have data to generate a balanced  treatment group and the control group. Once the intervention period ended, an impact evaluation endline survey was carried out to the households that are part of the treatment group and the control group. This survey collected data using the Household Dietary Diversity Survey (HDDS) questionnaire, adapted from  Swindale and Bilinsky (2006) (see link below). 

6 months

A very rough approximation would be to say that 20% of the time of all the Heads the Lab, plus 20% of the time of our Lead Data Analyst, went toward designing, managing, analyzing, reporting and following-up on the results, throughout the duration of the experiment and the sensing and exploration activities that led to it. 

The intervention itself was socialized in a series of co-creation workshops with public institutions, academics, and civil society, to identify specific opportunities to scale either the intervention itself or its methodological contributions to logistics of social assistance public programs and services. The intervention did not scale, but the methodologies we used allowed us to partner with the National Strategy of Innovation in launching the Public Innovators Proram. 

Possibly. The National University of Asunción, through its Research Direction, has committed already some resources for a version 2 of the pilot, with a focus on the offer side of local fairs and community gardens, and possibly connected to a new Innovation Center for Family Agriculture that the lab is supporting in its co-creation stage with community. Other institutions are interested as well. We will push some of these ideas forward within the context of the new Program to Develop Innovation Capacities in the Public Sector, the new cooperation we will have throughout 2022 with the National Strategy of Innovation. This Program will form a cohort of 50 public officials, selected by contest, in R&D+innovation methodologies and tools. We will support this effort both in its human capital development stage and more importantly, in the design and implementation of 2 pilots, one for public policy innovation and one for public service innovation. If teams from the institutions interested in following up upon this intervention are able to come up with a strong follow up, they will be able to obtain up to $15k for its piloting from our CO TRAC funds.  Moreover, the experiment led to the National Strategy of Innovation finally realizing the value of this type of applied R&D for public innovation, which resulted in the launch of the Public Innovators Program, which is entering its 3rd year of implementation ever since this experiment was completed. 

Not so many iterations were needed (or possible), mainly due to the limited time available. As soon as the exploration phase signaled the economic barrier problem as one of the most important ones to solve in our context, our team started to develop the idea of a food stamp intervention, basically following upon the idea of developing public innovation, in this case, innovation for food security assistance programs that would be feasible to take up by the Social Cabinet institutions that were working to provide such assistance during the pandemic. The first modification to this idea incorporated the connection to the local fair, to also incorporate a local economic development approach into the mix. And the second iteration limited the exchangeable products to only those available at the fair, after the local fair uphold their principle of never engaging in reselling of product: they only sell what they can produce. 

Be proactive in identifying who the key institutional actors are, and who are the people who is working in the field. Engage them and bring them to the table early on, they will be key to both adapt the intervention to the context and make its implementation possible. Secondly, here the target is really on two fronts: public innovation capacities and food security. For our portfolio, the priority is to develop innovation capacities in the public sector, and food security came as one challenge through which develop those capacities, but it is not then endgame of the portfolio. If the priority would be a portfolio in food security in and on itself, then expand the experimentation to include the season dynamics, the offer side, engaging other local fairs, and what other food security interventions are happening in parallel. A food systems approach might be better in this latter case, where you look into the full value chain of the system you are intervening.  

The hypothesis itself is replicable: increasing economic access certain goods as means to achieve an impact on improving some aspects of the phenomena that are associated to those goods. The intervention itself, may need adaptation to other thematic areas, but there many examples of “coupons” or “vouchers” approaches and examples. Think for instance on the SMEs Vouchers scheme (https://www.surrey.ac.uk/innovation/funding/sme-innovation-voucher-scheme) as one iteration of the same concept, but taken to the area of business innovation. 

Everything in the experiment came out of a cycle of three months of sensing and exploring the topic. Before that, we had also spent a year articulating efforts with the National Strategy of Innovation in mapping food security initiatives during the pandemic, both through collaborative map Wendá (map.wenda.org.py) and also through our community social innovation project Moiru. Learning from those initiatives also fed into our sensing and exploration phases for this learning cycle. 

We were particularly surprised by the strength of the community organization behind the local fair Ka’avo: a group of women farmers who were actively engaged in their community organization efforts, and who would establish their own rules regarding how to participate of the intervention. Our original plan involved giving them funding to buy and sell some of the products that were not produced by them, and they were clear with us that getting to the point where they were took them several years, and they wouldn’t break something that was their principle (to sell only what they produce) just to have higher revenues. We all admired this and did what we had to adapt the intervention to those rules, putting their principles first.