{"doi":"10.1073/pnas.1917046117","title":"Toward a science of delivering aid with dignity: Experimental evidence and local forecasts from Kenya","abstract":"565) received cash-based aid accompanied by a randomly assigned narrative: the default deficit-focused \"Poverty Alleviation\" narrative, an \"Individual Empowerment\" narrative, or a \"Community Empowerment\" narrative. They then chose whether to spend time building business skills or watching leisure videos. Both empowerment narratives improved self-efficacy and anticipated social mobility, but only the \"Community Empowerment\" narrative significantly motivated recipients' choice to build skills and reduced stigma. Given the diverse settings in which aid is delivered, how can organizations quickly identify effective narratives in a context? We asked recipients to predict which narrative would best motivate skill-building in their community. In study 2, this \"local forecasting\" methodology outperformed participant evaluations and experimental pilots in accurately ranking treatments. Finally, study 3 confirmed that the narrative most effective for recipients did not undermine donors' willingness to contribute to the program. Together these studies show that responding to recipients' psychological and sociocultural realities in the design of aid can afford recipients dignity and help realize aid's potential.","journal":"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences","year":2020,"id":66636,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":50,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.95,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":353187,"name":"Nicholas G. Otis","orcid":"0000-0002-2099-1783","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":354698,"name":"Justin Abraham","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":20115,"name":"Hazel Rose Markus","orcid":"0000-0002-1390-4389","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235252,"name":"Gregory M. Walton","orcid":"0000-0002-6194-0472","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353186,"name":"Catherine Thomas","orcid":"0000-0001-8349-1543","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":62,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:14:50.590588Z","pmid":"32581121","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}