“Vulnerability”

156 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance

Box 3.1

Varied Usages Given to the Words “Vulnerable” and “Vulnerability”

The word “vulnerable” is used in several different ways in poverty and social protection. It is important to be clear about which meaning applies, through clear word usage or context. Without such clarity (and too often in practice), discussions can become muddled. This is all the more so because although the concepts are clearly distinct, there may be co-occurrences of different sorts of vulnerability for the same individual or family.

• Children are biologically vulnerable in that their development is very sensitive to any deprivations (in nutrition, care, and physical and social environment). The elderly may have frail health. Children and some elderly individuals may also be vulnerable in the sense of limited agency. They depend on others to make decisions and act on their behalf. • Individuals can be called socially vulnerable because they have a trait that is associated with exclusion, for example, being a member of a nondominant indigenous, ethnic, racial, or religious group; or living with a disability; or identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or other in a context marked by discrimination with respect to education, jobs, services, and social interaction.

Such discrimination is important in and of itself. Moreover, it may carry with it the likelihood of poverty among those with one or more of the traits associated with exclusion. • Individuals are considered vulnerable to poverty in the sense of having an income that is close to the poverty line, having high variability of income, living in an area prone to shocks, or all three together.

In general, the finding that children or families with children are poorer is common, but the link between the elderly and poverty is less robust. For example, Guven and Leite (2016) examine elderly poverty in 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the countries, the elderly are not poorer than other groups, a result that echoes similar findings by Kakwani and Subbarao (2005).12 In looking at the contours of child poverty, Newhouse, Suarez-Becerra, and Evans (2016) show that, globally, among children younger than 18 years, 19.5 percent are estimated to live on less than $1.90 per day, as opposed to 9.5 percent of prime-age adults and 7.0 percent of those ages 60 and older, with similar patterns for higher poverty lines.13

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The number of poor children is more than eight times the number of poor elderly. The authors test alternative scales of economies and equivalences and find that the fundamental result of higher child than adult poverty holds, irrespective of scaling. There is important variation across countries, and so policy makers will want to look at numbers specific to their countries (see chapter 5).

Most of the analyses that profile welfare and household composition are done on the basis of household survey data that observe welfare jointly for the whole household and do not look within the household. Work attempting to do so is more nascent, requiring much stronger modeling assumptions, more detailed household survey information that collects significant data at the individual rather than the household level, or both. The still somewhat limited available evidence suggests that there is hidden poverty among children and women, and to a lesser extent the elderly, in nonpoor families (Brown, Calvi, and Penglase 2018; World Bank 2018a). It also suggests that measures of wealth correlate surprisingly little with other important metrics of welfare, such as anthropometrics (Brown, Ravallion, and van de Walle 2019).

The social assistance unit has important ramifications for delivery systems. In general, countries have some sort of foundational identification (ID) registry that allows social programs to verify the unique identity of an individual, and the IDs belong to individuals irrespective of life changes. Thus, all the administrative functions of programs with the individual as the unit of assistance can refer to a natural and immutable ID number (despite the still salient challenges with respect to lack of coverage and centralized or digitized records). However, a family registry or a household registry system must be constructed and updated with marriages and divorces, births and deaths, and movements to age of majority/independence or out of the household. Since the definitions are more difficult (as discussed above) and changes in family or household composition are common, programs with the family or household as the unit of assistance have an added layer of complexity to handle in delivery systems. (See chapter 4 for more details.)

What Are We Trying to Measure?

Welfare—and lack of welfare, or poverty—is a multidimensional concept. This is now widely recognized and the World Bank (among others) recommends measuring outcomes on both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. The nonmonetary measures that are often considered include housing, basic infrastructure (electricity, drinking water, sanitation, and cooking fuel), access to health and education services, and crime and security.