Information interventions can be a highly cost-effective way to empower citizens to access their benefits. After just two months, the benefits of the cards outweighed the costs. After eighteen months, the estimated increase in benefits that households received by purchasing more rice at lower prices was over seven times the cost of the ID card program. Eligible beneficiaries received 24 percent more rice for the cost of US $1 per household for the ID cards.

Testing different variations of information delivery helped identify the best approach. Communities were randomly assigned to receive different versions of ID cards or no cards at all, and to receive variations such as sharing basic eligibility information, inclusion of official rice prices, public dissemination of eligibility lists, and targeting only the lowest-income households. The evaluation found that including official prices, and public dissemination to increase transparency, helped maximize impact; this informed the future scale-up.

Program costs were low for ID cards, and even lower for electronic vouchers. The administrative costs of the ID card program corresponded to about 4 percent of the benefits disbursed, and costs of the e-vouchers were between 0.7 to 2 percent of the benefits disbursed.

Delivering benefits via electronic vouchers was more efficient and flexible than in-kind rice distribution. E-vouchers helped improve targeting to ensure those most in need had access to the food assistance program, and helped recipients more easily access the full amount of benefits they were entitled to. The in-kind rice distribution program was limited to rice only, but the vouchers enabled more flexible purchases of both rice and eggs, giving families more choice and access to protein-rich food.

There are important tradeoffs between in-kind and electronic benefit delivery. In-kind distribution provides more of a particular type of good, potentially leading recipients to consume more of that good than they would otherwise. In-kind distribution also often requires moving physical goods around warehouses and relies on local staff or volunteers to distribute, whereas e-vouchers can be electronically refilled. Governments using e-vouchers may have more control over whether targeted beneficiaries actually receive their full benefits, since a debit card is more difficult to sub-divide than locally distributed goods.

But e-vouchers raise their own set of logistical challenges: Availability of cell phone signals for debit card machines, challenges with PINs or other authentication, or even challenges in printing and ensuring that the correct debit cards reach the correct households. In states with limited administrative capacity, these differences are important to consider—both in terms of how programs are implemented in practice, and their ultimate impacts on people in need.