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Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa
The Way Forward: How to Make Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa More Effective and Innovative
BOX 5.5
BOX 5.5 Continued
Building Unified Registry Systems
• Support M&E. Registry systems need to be supported by sound M&E systems. Monitoring is critical for controlling data quality, assessing inclusion and exclusion errors, and dealing with complaints and grievances. Evalu-
Unified targeting and registry systems were pioneered by Chile in the 1980s and Colombia in the early 1990s. Aided by advances in technology and renewed attention to safety nets and social protection programs, these registries are regaining popularity in many countries. Most registries include poverty criteria as a way to rank or select beneficiaries. The following are steps to consider when building such systems: • Select the responsible agency. This agency will develop procedures, assemble the database, and share it with other agencies. In some countries, this is the National Planning Agency (for example, in Chile and Colombia); in others, it is the Social Ministry (in Brazil and the Philippines). • Decide on welfare (poverty) assessment methods and procedures. Options include verified income and wealth tests (common in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries), unverified means tests, and PMTs. PMTs using income or expenditures or multidimensional poverty indicators are common in middle- and lowincome countries with high informality and a lack of property, tax, or other asset or income databases (in Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Turkey, among others). • Decide on updating, recertification, and complaints resolution systems. In OECD countries, beneficiaries reapply for so-
cial benefits every year. In most other countries, reapplication for benefits is less frequent (for example, two years in Brazil, or three years or more when PMT systems are used). Registries are generally open to applicants at any time, and grievance systems are in place. • Mandate use of the unified registry system. Existing program administrators are generally resistant to using the new system for fear of having to delist noneligible households or facing questions about the reliability, objectivity, and accuracy of the system. To overcome these concerns, registry systems must develop quality controls and be able to withstand scrutiny by all stakeholders, including academia, CSOs, and the public. Uses of the registry for government programs can also be mandated by decree (as Brazil does for its registry, Cadastro Único) or other legal mandates. • Ensure IT and communications support. Registries involve management of large databases that grow rapidly—sometimes exponentially, with recertifications, complaints, grievances, and the required feedback from user programs. Sufficient IT and database capacity is the key to having a functional system. Modern registries now share data or subregistries through the Internet or governments’ secure private networks. Inadequate staff capacity to develop and support systems over time is often a major constraint.
ation can examine the incentives to game the system (through the impact on labor effort and informality) and the targeting outcomes (the extent to which benefits reach the poor and vulnerable population).
• There is a risk that some of the poor will be excluded and thus have no access to benefits. The latter concern can be mitigated through comprehensive outreach campaigns and regular updating of the registry. In addition, methods like the aforementioned census of the poor could be used to increase the coverage of the poor in the registry. During crises, the usefulness of the information collected in the unified registry depends, in large part, on the nature of the crisis and the selected assessment method. For instance, although PMT has a wellestablished track record in identifying chronic poverty, it performs less well in spotting transitory poverty, which is usually tied to changes in income rather than assets.
Service Delivery Mechanisms In normal times, effective use of modern technologies in benefit delivery systems is important to reduce administrative costs, leakage to nonbeneficiaries, and corruption. The ideal system is one that delivers cash or other benefits directly to beneficiaries without passing through intermediaries such as local public officials. During a crisis, modern technology makes cash a much more flexible instrument for rapid response than in-kind transfers. Fortunately for the Middle East and North Africa, citizens seem to be in favor of cash-based SSN transfers, as demonstrated in the MENA SPEAKS surveys (detailed in chapter 4). Use of smart cards, mobile payments, and over-the-counter payments in bank branches also facilitate an effective response during a crisis when benefits need to reach the targeted population quickly. Smart cards can be used to withdraw money at automatic teller machines (ATMs) at any time. However, in some countries, ATM networks might not cover rural or periurban areas, calling for alternative methods. These alternative modalities include over-the-counter payments in bank branches and mobile payments using direct cell phone
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