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Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa
BOX 5.1 Continued • How can countries best balance limited resources and widespread needs? Participants acknowledged that significant amounts are spent on SSN systems with limited impacts on poverty and inequality. The consensus was that it is important to make programs more cost-effective and results-oriented. Participants were interested in achievements of cost-effective SSN programs around the world. • How can social programs avoid dependency? Beneficiaries of some unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs in the region were perceived to treat the cash they receive as their “salary.” Although this situation may reflect the fact that many beneficiaries comprise categories of disabled and elderly persons or others unable to work, there was a consensus that it is important to move from perceiving programs as an entitlement to perceiving them as an opportunity—as an investment in people rather than as a handout. Governments in the region
were struggling to curtail dependency, especially when programs switch from categorical to poverty-based targeting. Strategies used around the world to avoid dependency were discussed, including targeting on correlates of poverty rather than labor income; conditioning transfers on behaviors that enhance human capital; requiring regular recertification; and channeling the assistance to women. • How can SSNs be seen in a broader context? The main concerns raised were (a) how to ensure that SSNs adequately serve all the poor, given their different circumstances and needs (for example, the disabled, the elderly, and young couples without children); and (b) how to make SSNs true insurance mechanisms, given that insurance is currently largely missing. The consensus was to focus on a few large-scale programs with different windows and use a common targeting database as the anchor.
A Path toward Effective and Innovative SSNs SSNs in the Middle East and North Africa are ripe for reform. As chapter 3 showed, the region relies heavily on inefficient and pro-rich price subsidies and ration cards. Subsidies aside, SSNs in the region are small and fragmented. Most of the poor and vulnerable fall through the cracks of nonsubsidy SSNs because of low coverage. Moreover, poor targeting practices lead to inefficient use of resources. Although subsidies are often pro-rich and ineffective relative to other SSN interventions, many people depend on them for their livelihoods. Thus, moving from the status quo toward more effective, reliable, and equitable SSNs requires careful thinking about technical aspects as well as the political economy of reform. SSNs in the region can better promote inclusion, livelihood, and resilience, and citizens expect them to do so. Because of their politically sensi-
The Way Forward: How to Make Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa More Effective and Innovative
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tive nature, SSN reforms require consensus building, the grounds for which already appear to exist: The MENA SPEAKS survey and Jordan Gives experiment have revealed that people hold the government responsible as the main provider of SSNs, and many are not satisfied with the effectiveness of current SSN policies and programs. In fact, the kinds of programs preferred by citizens in several Middle Eastern and North African countries are in line with the best practices in SSN design. Thus, governments have an enabling environment that can be rallied behind SSN reform. Moreover, several economies in the region have already implemented successful reforms that have attained significant positive results (see box 5.2). While there are no single solutions, the path toward more effective and innovative SSNs calls for action on four agenda items: improving the impact of SSN programs; enhancing the reliability and flexibility of SSN BOX 5.2
Emerging SSN Best Practices in the Middle East and North Africa Djibouti: Making a Workfare Program Work for Women and Children At the time of the 2008 food and fuel crisis, the country did not have SSNs in place that could be scaled up. Following the crisis, the government implemented a “workfare plus” program. The innovative SSN program provides short-term employment opportunities in community-based, labor- intensive works and supports the improvement of nutrition practices among participating households, focusing on preschool children and pregnant or lactating women. This combination of a workfare program with a nutrition intervention is designed to have a multigenerational impact by leveraging, through transfer of knowledge on nutrition, the use of additional income to improve a family’s health status. It promotes a holistic, community-driven approach, providing employment opportunities for both men and women.
Lebanon: Establishing a Targeting System Using Modern Technology Lebanon recently launched the National Poverty Targeting Program (NPTP), which establishes a central targeting database for social safety nets. The program automates data entry of applications and relies on local Social Development Centers to conduct household visits and outreach. Morocco: Launching a CCT Program to Boost School Attendance Morocco’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program has had a significant positive impact, as demonstrated through impact evaluation. To reduce school dropouts in rural areas, especially of girls, the government launched a cash transfer conditional on primary school attendance. The impact evaluation of the pilot demonstrated that dropout rates decreased by 57 percent and the rate of dropouts’ returning to school increased by (box continued on next page)