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Newsletter 7, June 2010 |
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| Cash Transfers as Social Protection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cash transfers to the poor have been viewed as an effective anti-poverty strategy. Cash transfers usually impose a conditionality on recipient households, in order to remain eligible for the transfer. By linking these transfers with, for instance, hospital visits and school attendance of children, impositions on human capital development are made, thus allowing for both short and long term poverty alleviation. However, areas needing attention in the implementation of cash transfer programmes include issues of targeting to identify ‘deserving’ beneficiaries, need for efficient administrative procedures, having a realistic assessment of institutional capacities and preparedness involved in the rolling out of such a mechanism (e.g strong monitoring, evaluation and accountability agencies) and also concerns of long term fiscal sustainability. The transfers have often been posited against employment centric public works programmes, boasting of the added advantage of being free from bureaucratic hurdles and mishandlings owing to the direct transfer of income to the recipients. |
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| Conditional Cash Transfers and Employment Guarantee Programmes in Asia | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fabio Veras Soares – International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth |
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Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) initiatives have been quite popular in most Latin American countries since the 1990s and now are spreading to some Asian countries such as Indonesia and the Phillippines. These programmes consist of transfers in cash to poor families with children under the condition that they send their children to school and pay regular visits to health centres. The dissemination of these programmes in Asia is causing some uneasiness among large segments of civil society. One of the most common arguments used against CCTs are: 1) people do not want ‘charity’ hand outs, but decent work and 2) conditions are not applicable when education and health services lack either quantity and quality or both. The recent introduction of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India has brought the “right to work” to the front stage of the discussion on social protection. NREGA represents a significant innovation in relation to the short-term and emergency based public works tradition. Among its innovations one can highlight: 1) Its targeting does not rely in paying low wages to attract only the poorest since it pays the minimum wage (it is the nature of the work – manual and unskilled – that functions as screening device); 2) any household can require up to 100 days of work that should be provided within 15 days under the penalty of the state having to pay unemployment benefit; 3) the inclusion of social audits and social accountability mechanisms to decrease fraud and enhance social participation. CCT and Employment Guarantee Schemes should not be presented in an “either/ or” fashion. They are not silver bullets that will change on their own the face of poverty in Asia overnight. On the contrary, they can be complementary tools in addressing a variety of vulnerabilities faced by families and individuals in the region. The spread of CCTs in rural areas of Latin America – to think of the challenges in the same setting - did not mean that poor/rural workers did not need complementary programmes that would enable them to have access to water, credit, markets, etc. Their living conditions have improved with the transfers and with the monitoring of school and health co-responsibilities - that actually can signal to governments bottlenecks in both supply and demand and prompt them to solve these - but they still need support to increase their productivity and diversify their production. In the Asian contexts, CCTs can be used to foster behaviour change related to specific problems such as the issue of missing girls in some regions and other forms of gender inequities. The LADLI schemes (conditional transfers for families with girl child) adopted in several Indian states are an example of how CCTs can be adapted to the Asian context. In addition, CCTs in the region can benefit immensely from some of the innovations brought about by NREGA, such as the social audits that together with the Right to Information Act can bring more transparency to the programmes, particularly, with regards to issues related to the supply of school and education services in terms of both quantity and quality. |
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| See also, | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Three Models of Social Protection - Alejandro Grinspun, International Poverty Centre, UNDP – Examines three possible modes through which social protection benefits may be delivered. See http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCOnePager17.pdf |
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| Cash Transfers and their Role in Social Protection- John Farrington, Paul Harvey, Rebecca Holmes and Rachel Slater -
http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/4684.pdf |
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Social Protection – The Role of Cash Transfers - http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCPovertyInFocus8.pdf |
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| Conditional Cash Transfers– Reducing Present and Future Poverty - Ariel Fiszbein and Norbert Schady with Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Margaret Grosh, Nial Kelleher, Pedro Olinto, and Emmanuel Skoufias http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTCCT/Resources/5757608-1234228266004/PRR-CCT_web_noembargo.pdf
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| Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: An Effective Tool for Poverty Alleviation? - Hyun H. Son, Asian Develvopment Bank - http://www.adb.org/Documents/EDRC/Policy_Briefs/PB051.pdf |
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| Cash Transfers as Social Protection – SPA Research | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Researchers at the SMERU Research Institute, Indonesia (http://www.smeru.or.id/), – through a project titled Assessing the Role of Women in Indonesia's New Conditional Cash Transfer Programme have been evaluating the effectiveness of two Government of Indonesia piloted Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, to understand their gender impacts through an analysis of intra-household decision-making dynamics. Below is a gist of the findings of SMERU research team. |
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| Ensuring Beneficiaries’ Compliance with the CCT Conditionality in Indonesia: A Notable Challenge | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sirojuddin Arif and Widjajanti Isdijoso, The SMERU Research Institute, Indonesia |
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Since the success of the Opportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Familia in Brazil in the late nineties, conditional cash transfer (CCT) has been increasingly seen as a new silver bullet for attacking poverty. The program has been replicated in many countries regardless of the differences in social and political contexts, as well as administrative capacity needed to run such a highly sophisticated mechanism. As the program’s name explicitly indicates, conditionality compliance should be the key element of CCT. Without such compliance, the program might not be able to achieve its goals of investing in human capital of the children from poor households. Nevertheless, as the case of the Indonesian CCT program (Program Keluarga Harapan -PKH) shows, conditionality enforcement is not easy and developing institutional capacity to monitor the compliance of the program recipients can be challenging.
When Indonesia started the PKH pilot program in 2007, the Government created an executing unit (Unit Pelaksana PKH), under the Ministry for Social Affairs at the central level, to manage the nation wide program implementation. The program was initially implemented in 7 provinces (out of 33 provinces in Indonesia) and covered around 388,000 chronically poor households, which were selected from around 19.1 million poor households that received unconditional cash transfer during 2005. In 2009 PKH had been expanded to cover around 720,000 households in 13 provinces and 70 districts. To support its operation, by 2009, more than 3,000 field supervisors (called pendamping) had been recruited to assist and monitor program beneficiaries, in addition to around 400 computer operators that support the online information system. The executing unit has signed cooperation agreement with the post office to distribute the fund to the program recipient as well as to distribute and collect monitoring forms from schools and health service providers. To support program implementation, a coordination team consisting of Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and State Ministry for Information and Communication is formed at the central level. Since 2001, because Indonesia has adopted a decentralized form of government which made the provision of education and health services under the full responsibility of the district government, each district government participating in the program has to show their willingness to support the program and ensure the availability of health and education services in the PKH areas by signing agreement with the central PKH executing unit. A coordination team, similar to that at the central level, is formed in each participating district, and a district level executing unit is formed within the district level office for social affairs. The PKH field supervisors are stationed in the district level executing unit although they are recruited and paid by the central government. The field supervisors have to maintain close contact with program beneficiaries and ensure their compliance with program conditionality. In addition, the program requires schools and health centers to report the performance of the recipient household by filling in the monitoring form distributed through the post office and sending it back to the post office that will hand it over to the PKH executing unit. Despite these complex program support arrangements, coordination remains challenging. Until mid-2009, many schools and community health centers still had no or limited understanding about PKH or which households received the program, and they did not fill in and lodge the monitoring form. Among the problems raised were the late and slow dissemination of information to the relevant service providers, and financial constraints that deter good coordination among different stakeholders involved in the program implementation. Indeed, some program recipients do meet most program conditions, but it is affected more by their own interest to provide better education to their children and to maintain the health condition of the pregnant women and babies. Their compliance is also affected by access to schools and health services. The direction from the field supervisor has also encouraged compliance with program conditionality, even in the absence of monitoring by schools and health service providers. Given that PKH coverage is smaller than other national social protection programs such as the health insurance program run by the Ministry of Health and School Operational Assistance Program run by the Ministry of Education, the health service providers and schools seems to pay less attention and see PKH monitoring as adding more to their already heavy burden. Thus, it seems that the external monitoring system needs to be simplified, made more manageable, and less burdensome for schools and health service providers, probably by focusing more on stronger internal monitoring. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Experiences of Cash Transfers in India | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Ministry of Women & Child Development, Government of India is implementing “Dhanalakshmi”, a Scheme for conditional Cash Transfer for the Gird Child. The scheme provides for cash transfer to the family of a girl child on fulfilling certain conditionality relating to registration of birth, immunization, enrolment and retention in school till class VIII; and an insurance coverage if the girl remains unmarried till the age of 18. The aim of the scheme has been force the families to look upon the girl child as an asset rather than a liability, by allowing cash inflow to the family. Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is a safe motherhood intervention being implemented with the objective of reducing maternal and neo-natal mortality by promoting institutional delivery among the poor pregnant women. It integrates cash assistance with delivery and post-delivery care, with special dispensation given for states with low institutional delivery rates. ‘Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna’ is being implemented in Bihar wherein a schoolgirl, upon passing class VIII, gets a cheque of Rs 2,000 to buy a bicycle so that she can continue to go to school every day. This has helped check the dropout rate of schoolgirls to a great extent across the state. Also food coupons are being experimented with in Bihar, bearing the quantity, type and price of foodgrain which can be claimed either by the household at subsidized ration shops or by dealers, who encash these to transfer the grains from state go-downs. This has reduced leakages at various levels, stemming from ambiguities related to loss and siphoning off of foodgrains. |
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Also see |
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| Education Vouchers – Is there a Model for India? - Eva Weidrich | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Other Theme Related Resources | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Social Protection in Asia is a research, networking and advocacy programme that aims to create a regional voice and develop a research base for advocating innovative and informed policy on Social Protection issues. We welcome your contributions The SPA Network aims to keep people informed of required and requested information and to facilitate collaboration on social protection. To do this, the network needs you! If you would like to share your experiences, express your views or share information, for example, if there is an event you think network members would be interested in, please contact info@socialprotectionasia.org |
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