Thompson and Magnan ask what makes an NGO livestock scheme work. Handing animals to poor rural households has become standard practice for organizations fighting poverty among smallholders in low-income countries, yet evidence on whether such asset transfers deliver is only beginning to accumulate.

Their case is a program in rural Haiti that gave recipients goats along with training. Long-run aims such as better health, schooling, housing and farm output all depend on a prior step: recipients must build herds that stay healthy and reproduce. The authors measure herd health and growth across households, then regress those outcomes on household characteristics to test predictions drawn from work on asset-based poverty.

Wealthier recipients, they find, end up with smaller and less valuable herds than poorer ones. Location matters for herd growth, access to land sharply lowers the death rate among kids, and weaker evidence suggests women lose fewer. If the pattern holds elsewhere, NGOs gain criteria for choosing whom to enroll.