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For example, a teacher may be involved in selecting poor children for scholarships, but also must interact with the parents of all students on their learning, including those of children not selected. Clear protocols for oversight and control procedures are needed even when communities are given significant authority in beneficiary selection. A regular monitoring and evaluation system, which includes spot checks, process evaluations, and independent audits, will need to be defined, as well as defining a rotation of members to (1) share the burden of selection, and (2) ensure that different community members can participate in the process, increasing citizen engagement and local governance. A grievance system to respond to beneficiary complaints and ensure a high level of social accountability is desirable. Together these can detect systemic problems to be addressed. These processes require thorough training of and guidance for community committees and an adequate and easily accessible information system for enrollment, transactions, and proper grievance and appeal mechanisms to compensate for the inherent errors and limitations occurring in implementation.
Conclusion It is hard to summarize both fully and succinctly such a long chapter, spanning diverse targeting methods and with many technical details for each, but this conclusion points out some common threads. Policy makers must make considered judgments. Chapter 5 discusses the choice of targeting method(s). Even after that choice is made, further judgments are needed in designing the implementation of any given method— about things like the choices over the unit of assistance, the weight put on errors of exclusion versus errors of inclusion, and the emphasis on targeting accuracy versus administrative costs versus incentive effects versus transparency or ownership. There is no reason to be purist about targeting methods. Many, many countries and programs use multiple methods. Moreover, the line between means testing and HMT is blurry as is that between HMT and PMT. Further, CBT and PMT are increasingly combined. Data matter. Traditional data, in the sense of government-held administrative data, data from applicant interviews, or community members’ knowledge of their neighbors, still dominate in targeting practice. The revolution in people holding and using foundational or functional IDs, especially eIDs, and increased computing power are making it far easier to create integrated or interoperable data systems that lower costs and increase the dynamism of social registries. As data coverage and quality improves, more countries will meet the minimum conditions to move
