3.3 Morocco’s Progress toward Universal Social Protection

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to “notified emergencies.” It has legislated a new Social Security Code and the rollout of a Social Security Board, which consolidates formerly fragmented systems and focuses administrative effort to improve coverage of informal sector workers by key insurance and assistance programs. To improve coverage of migrants, India has taken several actions, premier among them making access to the flagship Public Distribution System portable (World Bank 2020b, 2020c). Some countries are using the heightened expectations of social protection to expand the coverage and programming of their permanent programs. Morocco is a case in point (box 3.3), although other countries, such as Brazil, Nigeria, and Pakistan, have also announced plans or begun actions to increase coverage of their programs by some degree. A number of countries will continue their move to digital registration and payment (see more in chapter 4), since once the channels are built, they remain available for further use.

Box 3.3

Morocco’s Progress toward Universal Social Protection

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, Morocco is expanding its social protection system, from a low-coverage, low-adequacy, and regressive precrisis system. The COVID-19 crisis hit the country in its incipient stage of reforming costly and weak social assistance. Despite Morocco’s significant spending on social assistance, equivalent to 3 percent of gross domestic product (compared with an average of 1.8 percent among other middle-income countries), half of this spending financed regressive consumer subsidies for liquefied petroleum gas, sugar, and flour.a At the same time, the noncontributory social assistance system was fragmented, with more than 40 programs of modest generosity and signficant coverage gaps. The two most important programs before the crisis, the conditional cash transfer program Tayssirb and the noncontributory health insurance fee waiver, the Medical Assistance Plan (RAMED),c still left about half of the poorest quintile uncovered and offered relatively low benefits.

Morocco’s response to the unprecedented COVID-19 shock was fast, resolute, and comprehensive. The government of Morocco rapidly mobilized human, financial, and technological resources to reach a large share of the population affected by the strict confinement policy, including its poor and vulnerable population. For informal workers, who lack social security and are not affiliated with the main pension

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Box 3.3 (continued)

house (CNSS), the government set a specific budget line under its Special Pandemic Fund CAS-COVID-19 called Tadamon (meaning “solidarity” in Arabic) to distribute an emergency cash transfer.d The program provided a subsistence amount to applicants based on their family size: (1) DH 800 (about US$82) for families of one or two members, (2) DH 1,000 (about US$103) for families of three or four members, and (3) DH 1,200 (about US$124) for families of five or more members. Tadamon’s coverage was large, reaching two-thirds of all households in the country.e

Postcrisis reforms. On July 29, 2020, the king of Morocco announced a broad set of measures to support the recovery of the Moroccan economy and the resilience of households, including a deep-reaching reform of the social protection and labor sector,f which were futher detailed in a blueprint by the Ministry of Financeg and legislated as the Framework Social Protection Law in September 2021. To increase the resilience of households, especially those in the informal sector, in the first phase, Morocco will expand and roll out mandatory health insurance until the end of 2022 and a new universal family allowance until December 2024. The second phase, to be implemented from 2024 to 2025, will expand the old-age pension coverage and compensation for loss of employment to those who do not already have it.

Source: World Bank (2020d). a. For example, only 7 percent of the liquefied petroleum gas subsidy benefited households in the bottom quintile of consumption, while about 50 percent went to the richest quartile. b. Tayssir supports poor and vulnerable families, conditional on their schoolage children attending school, with the aim of improving school enrollment and reducing dropout rates. It was first launched in 2008 and is managed by the Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training and Scientific Research. During the 2019/20 school year, Tayssir disbursed about US$200 million to support 2.4 million children in primary and secondary school. The program pays the household DH 60 (about US$7) per month for every registered child in the first and second grades; DH 80 (about US$8) per month for children in the third and fourth grades; DH 100 (US$11 equivalent) for children in the fifth and sixth grades; and DH 140 (about US$15) per month for children in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades (secondaire collégial). c. As of September 2019, RAMED covered about 14.4 million individuals. d. The website is www.tadamoncovid.ma. e. The first wave of the emergency cash transfers (ECTs) in April 2020 reached 4.2 million households. Eligible households automatically received a second wave in May 2020. Through the grievance and redress mechanism, 1.25 million households were added at a later date. Therefore, the first and second ECT waves benefited a total of 5.45 million households, of which 2.8 million were RAMED and 2.65 million were non-RAMED recipients. Further, female-headed households comprised around 1.17 million, constituting 21 percent of the first and second waves of the ECTs. A third wave was distributed in July 2020 and covered all previous beneficiaries. As of October 2020, the ECTs had distributed a total of DH 16.150 billion (US$1.65 billion). f. The king’s speech can be accessed at https://www.moroccoworldnews.com /2020/07/313044/full-text-of-king-mohammed-vis-21st-throne-day-speech. g. The minister’s presentation can be accessed at https://www.finances.gov.ma /Publication/cabinet/2020/Pr%C3%A9sentation%20Minstre_03.08.2020_VFr.pdf.

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What it takes to prepare social protection systems to be shock responsive overlaps heavily with the move to universal social protection for stable times, with multiple programs that address different population needs and characteristics. Improved coverage, dynamism, program design and flexibility, and social protection delivery systems are vital for both crisis and noncrisis times. Shock responsiveness puts a premium on flexible programs, agile delivery systems, and real-time information and encourages the development of the social insurance subsector as well as social assistance. In particular, greater access to more information and big data underpins much of this. A greater capacity to manage various large administrative databases can lead to better delivery and targeting of programs. How this is done in times of shocks depends on the nature of the shock but helps drive dynamic assessment.

In summary, this chapter was a journey from the general but abstract idea of “helping the poor and vulnerable” through many of the complexities involved in reaching implementable definitions and program designs. The first half of the chapter covered defining welfare, the assistance unit, and eligibility thresholds. The second half showed the considerable importance of dynamics, as idiosyncratic shocks affect families and natural disasters or economic crises affect nations. Handling these calls for a huge range of policy decisions, programs, and operational capacities. In normal times, this means the following: • Defining objectives and the assistance unit for each program • Defining the welfare measure of choice for each program • Understanding local volatility of incomes • Setting eligibility thresholds considering vulnerability and the purpose of each program • Determining the periodicity and eligibility threshold or criterion of each program's recertification. To make systems responsive to shocks, this also means the following: • Preparing systems ahead of covariate shocks to facilitate the speed of response • Designing emergency responses that can cover the informal sector • Balancing focus on the already poor, the new poor, and those most affected • Balancing broad coverage and flat benefits against a more tailored design.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 elucidate how different aspects of the move from abstraction to implementable concepts can be done. Chapter 4 looks at how these considerations are reflected in the design and operational readiness of the delivery chain. It considers each step of the chain: outreach, intake and