Support Program

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added street theater and outreach by “mother leaders” who were active claimants in the income support program (box 4.1). The Philippines’ Listahanan social registry is known for its positive branding efforts (Lindert 2017; Velarde 2018). World Bank and DFAT (2020) cites traditional problems but improving practice in outreach in East and South Asia.

BOX 4.1

Community-Based Outreach in Pakistan’s Benazir Income Support Program

In Pakistan, as in many countries, the poorest communities are the most widely dispersed and difficult to reach, the more so in Pakistan’s diverse geographic and cultural landscape. Community outreach is therefore a key pillar for mobilizing and engaging eligible beneficiaries. The Kafaalat cash transfer program reaches 4.6 million poor families from those in the National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER). The program was developed during 2010–11 by carrying out a nationwide door-to-door survey using a proxy means test–based poverty scorecard. Between 2016 and 2020, the government completed an update of the NSER through a combination of administrator and on-demand intake and registration.

Mobilizing communities for targeting presented a myriad of challenges, from low levels of literacy to lack of mobility and cultural and language barriers. Having learned from the previous experience during the NSER update process, the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) collected information on media habits to identify the most effective communication channels. It also relied on indigenous and traditional tools of mobilization, such as mosque announcements, interpersonal communication, and use of opinion leaders, community elders, and local BISP Beneficiary Committees led by mother leaders. The program also introduced more systematic public information campaigns and used a mix of targeted media, such as radio, display, and distribution of information, education, and communication materials (posters and frequently asked questions lists) that included more visually illustrated material given the low levels of literacy among potential beneficiaries.

The community outreach strategy was adapted during COVID-19 to mitigate contagion risks for the eligible beneficiaries. To address the socioeconomic impacts of the country’s preemptive COVID-19

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BOX 4.1 (continued)

response in 2020, the government launched the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which aimed to provide PRe 12,000 (US$75 at the time; US$68 in 2022) per family to 15 million families, including the existing 4.6 million families under the Ehsaas Kafaalat. The government employed mobile phone messaging services and other new communication tools to collect and provide eligibility information from and to potential beneficiaries and reduce physical touch points for intake, registration, and payments. Physical delivery points were managed through proper social distancing measures.

Source: Prepared by the National Social Protection Program for Results (P158643) Task Team, World Bank.

As with outreach, intake and registration processes should consider language, mobility, and cultural (ethnic, religious, or other) considerations. People of diverse backgrounds and especially those in the population that a given program is meant to serve should find it straightforward and comfortable to apply for benefits that might be due to them. Forms and interfaces may need to be built in multiple languages, and staffing should accommodate the principal languages spoken in each area of the country, with some provision for interpretation of less commonly spoken languages. Ideally, program staff will reflect the cultural background of clients to reduce any issues of discrimination, ill-treatment, or stigma. Mexico actively recruited and trained indigenous people, mostly women, from program areas for the PROGRESA-Oportunidades-PROSPERA program.2 In Brazil, some social assistance centers recruit quilombolas3 as staff to avoid barriers among quilombola community clients. Bulgaria makes an effort to use Roma staff to facilitate access by Roma clients. In the Republic of Congo, the intake forms and interviews can be done in Lingala as well as French. In Mali, they may be done in Bambara or French. Myanmar uses locally recruited facilitators in Shan state in its new maternal cash transfer program.

Intake and registration may be done “on demand” in an office or through online applications and/or in “administrator-driven” or “census sweep”–style field operations, each carrying risks of errors of exclusion that must be mitigated. • On-demand application processes are normally open continuously. They may use a combination of physical office, call-in, or virtual application tools. Continuously open application processes are vital to the inclusion of newly formed families, families new to the location, or families newly

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in need. However these processes rely on the initiative of the applicant to apply and are thus at risk of errors of exclusion. Thus, outreach is vital so the potential applicant would know how to apply, and transaction costs to applicants must be low. Using interoperable systems to refresh information regularly from other government databases is a common element of on-demand application and recertification processes.

On-demand processes also lend themselves to differentiated periods for recertification, by program or client characteristic. • Administrator-led processes go to the field periodically, usually in a census sweep, and thus may help reach those who would not have known to apply or found it easy to do so. These administrator-led processes are mostly associated with programs that use a proxy means test (PMT) or community-based targeting or a combination to determine eligibility, although they are occasionally also used at the initiation of demographically targeted programs. These mass field mobilizations sometimes combine in a single operation several steps of the delivery chain—even from outreach to onboarding. But they will contain inherent errors of exclusion during the periods between mobilizations if households do not have a way to request registration. This will especially affect newly formed households, households new to the area, or those that have suffered a decline in welfare since the prior targeting exercise.

Because of this, even programs with periodic administrator-led processes should also have on-demand processes and outreach, a feature that is all too often missing.

An informal survey of the state of social registries showed that just over half of the countries, mostly upper-middle-income countries and those in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, have dynamic registries. With some notable exceptions (for example, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, and most recently Colombia, which is in the process of converting to a dynamic system), most of the countries in Latin America still have static registries despite many of them having been established many years ago. Africa’s registries too are mostly still static, although the registries are younger and in lower income countries, so this may be a natural first step.

Intake and registration involve the process of collecting self-reported information through an application form or questionnaire and documentation to register the intended population for consideration of potential eligibility for social programs. The form should be user-friendly: not too long in terms of the number of questions or time taken to administer, and easy to comprehend and navigate. To reduce transaction costs to clients, this process should avoid gathering (again) complex information that can be drawn from other databases through data matching. The basic components of information to collect fall into the following categories:

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• Information on the social assistance unit. This contains at least the name and pertinent ID number (or age, place of birth, or other identifiers) of at least the individual(s) who comprise the assistance unit. Even for programs focused on a specific individual, it is often valuable to gather information on all members of the assistance unit or household and how they are related, for example, for cross-referrals to other programs, to build a comprehensive measure of welfare, or to link the target individual (child) with the legally responsible adult(s). • Contact information. This information includes the applicant’s mobile phone, email, physical address, or georeferenced coordinates. At a minimum, the program administrators need a way to communicate with the applicant. Location information may also serve in assessing risks, needs, or welfare. • Sometimes to minimize the number of contacts needed with the client to finish enrollment, the application form also includes information pertinent to payments. Strictly speaking, this information is not necessary at intake, and its collection may be deferred until enrollment. Information in the first three categories may be sufficient to determine eligibility for programs based only on age or location. • For programs where eligibility is determined by socioeconomic status, such as by means, hybrid, or proxy means testing, intake and registration should also include sociodemographic and socioeconomic variables that allow program administrators to obtain the actual welfare or estimate it based on the characteristics of the household members (chapter 6 provides details on how to measure or estimate welfare).4 • Given the role of social programs in preventing/mitigating and responding to shocks, some administrators are beginning to collect additional information at intake, such as exposure to natural hazards.

The required documentation should be kept to a minimum to lower transaction costs and errors of exclusion. Although supporting documents can be required on any of the above topics, it is important to avoid requiring excessive documentation as each item may generate transaction costs to the applicant or be impossible for them to achieve, thereby generating exclusion. When data exchange with other government databases can be set up, this can lower the transaction costs to applicants and potential errors of exclusion. For example, it is preferable not to ask individuals to supply pay stubs, tax statements, titles to government-registered assets, or benefits from other government social programs, but to draw on data matching to access such information where it is required for eligibility determination. Tesliuc et al. (2014), for example, report that in Uzbekistan, about 25 percent of the poorest quintile report the number and complexity of documents and forms to be filled out as one of the reasons for not applying for benefits. At the opposite end is Albania, where applicants must submit only two

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documents in addition to filling out a declaration with the required information, which is then subject to verification through cross-checks with other institutions and agencies.

All social assistance programs require applicants to declare and prove their identity. This could be simple or not, depending on the country’s identity ecosystem and degree of integration with the social assistance program. The drive toward higher coverage of foundational ID systems, and especially electronic identification (eID), hugely facilitates some of the goals and processes of social assistance. However, even in countries where the coverage of foundational IDs is overall high enough to be used in normal enrollment processes, there is a risk of important exclusions if registration processes do not provide alternatives for those who do not have the firstchoice document. Court cases in several countries have upheld the right to services without ID, with India being notable but not alone among them.5 Since in general those who are not included in the ID system are those who may be at high risk of other exclusions that may be associated with poverty or risk, it is important for distributional outcomes.6

The availability of foundational ID registries or their electronic variants reduces both the transaction costs of social assistance applicants and exclusion and inclusion errors. Foundational ID systems7 provide identity credentials for all the resident population, irrespective of citizenship or immigration status. Examples of ID credentials include birth certificates provided by the civil registry and ID cards provided by a population or ID registry. While traditionally these credentials are in paper form, recently many countries have migrated from paper to electronic registries, from simple paper credentials to smart ID cards with biometric or other secured elements, or even to online biometric authentication systems. According to the Global ID4D Dataset 2018,8 96 percent of high- and middle-income countries have at least one form of digitized ID registry, but only 70 percent of the low-income countries have such a program. When such e-registries are available and interoperable with the social program, there are several advantages. First, the e-registries deduplicate their records to ensure that one individual has only one ID record. Second, a social program could check online if the ID provided by applicants is genuine or not, and if it is, the ID system will guarantee that it is unique. Deduplicated IDs can reduce the risk of fraud through duplicate or ghost beneficiaries and lower errors of inclusion. Third, the use of a foundational ID system implies that the ID used for the program can also be used to comply with know-your-customer standards in the finance sector and facilitate digital payments, which can lower administrative and transaction costs and increase security.

Countries without foundational ID systems (other than a paper-based civil registry) have created a variety of functional ID systems to manage identification, authentication, and authorization for specific sectors or

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use-cases, such as social protection. For example, in the United States, identity is proved through an individual’s social security number and driver’s license. In most low-income countries and some middle-income countries, this would result in incomplete coverage of the population with ID credentials. In these countries, social programs use more limited functional documents without the potential benefits of data matching and know-your-customer verification.9

Incomplete coverage of the population with ID documents or other credentials may be a barrier to participation for some in important target groups, such as women and people who are poorer, more remote, and less literate (see, for example, Gelb and Metz 2018; World Bank 2018b). Data from the Global ID4D Dataset 2018 indicate that an estimated 1 billion people do not have an official proof of identity; nearly 50 percent of those are in Africa; and 40 percent of people in low-income countries lack IDs (World Bank 2018a). The data suggest a gender gap in low-income countries, where close to 44 percent of women lack IDs, compared with 28 percent of men. The importance of remedying ID issues is reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal target on the topic and has sparked initiatives such as the World Bank’s ID4D program to improve coverage of IDs throughout the world and especially in developing countries. In various countries, efforts to improve the coverage of IDs work in tandem with social assistance programs that aim to reach the people who are least likely to have IDs. In Pakistan, the Benazir Income Support Program and National Database and Registration Authority cooperated extensively to provide the Citizen National Identity Card to women, with the number of registered women nearly doubling from 21 million to 40 million between 2009 and 2012.10 Following the introduction of a child grant in the poorest districts, birth registration increased from 40 to 90 percent (Amjad, Irfan, and Arif 2015). Yet, in many countries, the ID issue is not yet solved, particularly for the groups that are of most concern for poverty targeting and other social assistance. Care must be taken to work to remove these barriers to foundational IDs and/or provide workarounds, such as accepting various forms of functional IDs or providing program-specific functional IDs.

The need to prove (legal) residency or provide an address can be another important barrier to program participation, and it must be considered critically. Social programs often request proof of residency. This is especially the case for programs implemented by lower levels of government where financing is local or depends on a rationed allocation of budget or program slots from a higher level of administration. This may be done to prevent double-dipping, where a person claims benefits from two jurisdictions, or to conserve resources to match local allocations. Some programs may request an address as part of establishing ID or a way to contact clients. Moreover, PMT formulae usually consider aspects of the applicant’s

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dwelling as part of the needs assessment. These requirements each serve a seemingly useful administrative function, but they can also create barriers of exclusion for families that move from one jurisdiction to another or for the homeless. In China, for example, people without local household registration, hukou, are not entitled to benefits under the dibao social assistance program, and dibao benefits are not portable across jurisdictions, rendering migrants excluded by design.11 In India, none of the flagship national social assistance programs have traditionally been open to cross-state migrants, although as part of the COVID-19 policy response, India plans to make benefits in the Targeted Public Distribution System portable (World Bank 2020a). In Albania, claimants who do not have a formal residence or domicile in the locality where they reside de facto are required to apply in the locality of formal residence or submit documents issued from those localities. Thus, internal migrants are not excluded by design, but the requirements may represent barriers for the poor in accessing the program (Tesliuc et al. 2014). In Colombia, a court case in 2016 prompted the National Planning Department that operates the PMT-based social registry to work with municipalities to develop a registry of the homeless and find ways to associate them to programs (DNP 2016). Although a mailing address has been the traditional way of providing a point of contact, there are a range of options for those with insecure housing, such as allowing claimants to use the address of a nongovernmental organization or social services provider or a post office box, cell phone, or email address. It may be easier for field workers to use a set of Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, since addressing is difficult in rural areas and informal urban settlements. This alternative may provide advantages in merging with geotagged data sets that are pertinent to disaster hazard or maps of delivery of allied social services.

Where the assistance unit is the family or household rather than the individual, there will need to be some register of the membership of the social assistance unit. Some countries have family certificates or registers already established for purposes outside social protection,12 which can facilitate the use of “family” as the social assistance unit and aid in various parts of delivery systems, but many countries do not. Most family/ household-level registries are formed as part of the application process for a social program or registration in a social registry. Family and or household composition is self-declared as most countries do not have family or household registries. When civil registration is fully automated and IDs are widespread, civil registration allows cross-verification of the declared information through the interoperability of systems. However, this process misses undeclared cases, such as children who left home and live with partners without declaring a change in residence or the fact that they entered some form of union. Based on the self-declared information,

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a unique number is generated for the family or household with a listing of the IDs for each member (be it foundational or functional). In some cases, the individual number of the head of household can be used as the household number, although this is less desirable because it impedes mapping together information from different programs with different assistance units or consolidating a picture of the income and assets of all family members. Because membership in the social assistance unit is dynamic, there should be a way (and a requirement) for families to register such changes. In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that quantify the sources of error and fraud in social protection programs, misreporting of the composition of the assistance unit and the identity of its members is the second largest factor, after nondeclaration nondeclaration or under-declaration of income and assets. This was the case in the United Kingdom in 2017–18, where misreporting of household composition or living together with another earner were the second reason for the estimated error and fraud rate for four means-tested programs; the first cause was misreporting of income or assets.13

Social registries shared across multiple programs are a commonly used tool, although many are still nascent. Barca and Chirchir (2014, 2017) and Leite et al. (2017) reveal considerable diversity in the typologies and trajectories of these systems with respect to their (1) institutional arrangements (central and local); (2) use as inclusion systems (single or multiprogram use, static or dynamic intake and registration); (3) structure as information systems (structure of data management and degree and use of interoperability with other systems); and (4) coverage, which ranged from 75 percent of households or more in a quarter of the cases to less than 10 percent of households in another quarter of the cases (box 4.2).

Using a shared social registry as the entry point for multiple social programs has benefits and risks for targeting outcomes. By providing a shared format, it harmonizes the information collected and can add coherence across social policy. By serving as a common portal, it can lower the costs of application as a household may have to apply only once to receive multiple sets of benefits, or at least receive cross-referrals that improve their knowledge of programs from which they may benefit. Similarly, shared registries may lower governments’ total administrative efforts toward outreach, intake, and registration. By uniting the efforts across various programs, governments may be able to amass resources and gravitas to do the work well. However, concentrating provision also concentrates risks as any failure in outreach or process affects not just a single program but many. The heavier is the use of the registry in social policy, the more important it be dynamic, inclusive, and accurate, and its data well protected. Assessment of the needs and conditions of applicants is the part of the whole delivery chain that is most clearly associated with “targeting” or