Fortifying Weak Links in the Delivery Chain to Reduce Errors of Exclusion and Inclusion

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current practices. Many of the lessons provided in the chapter are a synopsis of those from Leite et al. (2017) and Lindert et al. (2020) and, for the crisis sections, from Beazley, Solórzano, and Barca (2019) and Bowen et al. (2020), although the illustrations from recent program practice aim to supplement those or emphasize their targeting aspects. Those fuller documents are considered companion volumes to this one, especially Lindert et al. (2020). The treatment here is brief and meant to provide enough of a framework to illustrate the need to delve deeply into the topic.

The chapter is organized as follows. The first section follows the delivery chain, highlighting at each step considerations that are important in ensuring that all who are in the group meant to be served actually are served, with dignity and at moderate administrative costs. The second section takes up some of the considerations needed to make delivery systems responsive to major shocks. The third section discusses some of the institutional issues that shape the client interface for the delivery of social assistance. The final section considers back-office issues in data management and data protection.

Fortifying Weak Links in the Delivery Chain to Reduce Errors of Exclusion and Inclusion

The first phase of the delivery chain, outreach, involves communication to inform the intended population about one or more social programs for which they may be eligible and the processes for registering. If registration processes serve just one social program, then the communications would focus on the main features of that program (objectives, eligibility criteria, rights, and responsibilities). If the registration processes are common across programs in a shared social registry, then the communications need to cover the main features of those diverse programs or at least the notion that the social registry helps connect people to programs. The effect of communication on targeting begins at the outreach phase, but it elicits (or fails to elicit) actions from the intended population at every phase and thus must be embedded into each phase rather than being viewed as separate from the rest of program implementation.

Success in the communications phase would be that people can make a well-informed decision about whether to apply for a program and what it takes to do so. Success on these two fronts can lower transaction costs for people and administrative costs for programs at later steps in the delivery chain. People who are not eligible for clear reasons (wrong age, location, or clearly do not meet eligibility criteria) may understand that and therefore not waste time and hope in applying. Those who are likely to be eligible would see a benefit in doing so. They would understand how to apply or how to obtain further details in simple ways so that they need not suffer

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extra transaction costs by journeying and queueing more times than needed at different offices. Moreover, well-informed decisions by potential clients will reduce the number of unsuccessful applications social protection program officers would need to handle and the administrative costs involved.

Communicating proactively in ways that are sensitive to the clients’ needs and barriers is vital to success throughout the delivery chain. Comprehensive communication strategies include multiple channels and are tailored to the target population. For a busy urban population in a highincome setting, websites and call centers may help provide information at flexible times and quickly, although even in this setting, the digital divide and lack of baseline knowledge must be overcome. Broadcast channels may include radio, television, social media, or community theater; they may include posters and pamphlets in well-selected locations, such as markets, community centers, places of recreation or houses of worship, and shared water points or bus stops; and they may work through trusted agents in contact with the intended population, such as community leaders, religious leaders, teachers or health workers, or peers such as fellow mothers or youth leaders. It may be helpful to work with advocacy or nongovernmental groups that provide services to groups commonly facing barriers to inclusion, such as people living with disabilities; people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), and others; homeless people; or others. The messages and media should be well tailored to the audience’s language and level of literacy and be phrased in ways to encourage take-up and discourage stigma. They should be inclusive of those with vision or hearing impairments. Simplicity and clarity are helpful for those who are stressed by poverty or crisis or have limited experience of agency with respect to bureaucracy. Communications should be repeated or reinforced at judicious intervals. A person might miss one message and it may take more than one seeing/hearing of a message to persuade someone that it is worth taking action to apply for a program. Timing could be important—with messages repeated at times of heightened need, such as the beginning of the lean season or school year, and many countries have boosted outreach in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Active outreach using a variety of agents can promote potential inclusion of marginalized groups who may be unaware of the processes for inclusion in social programs. This typically requires special efforts to find potentially eligible people who are likely to be left out of more mainstream efforts, in their homes, places of work, or places of leisure. Active outreach strategies rely on the deployment of teams at the local level to focus on identifying those who may not be able to enroll in programs in city centers and in particular geographic areas that are remote, hard to reach, or comprised of a population that is consistently marginalized. Brazil’s Busca Ativa outreach program, which is described in chapter 2, is well known. Pakistan