Client Interface: The Interaction between People and Institutions

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since some had data that were several years out of date and none had postcrisis data, many countries supplemented these with new application processes, which were built on the existent infrastructure of large program data systems and social registries in most cases.

The emergency responses to the COVID-19-induced economic crisis echo a refrain learned in past crises—when there is urgency of action, what might not have been imagined possible can be done, albeit rarely perfectly. Many countries rolled out programs in record time to record numbers of clients, a fact more impressive because it was accomplished while many aspects of logistics were impaired by closures of public offices, public transport, and other supporting services. Enormous good was done, although in most countries it was not enough to match the scale of losses. But the speed meant that systems could not be fully tested and every wrinkle ironed out before going to scale. It made it hard to overcome all the usual barriers to perfect inclusion. Thus, to varying degrees in different places, challenges were seen at various scales. In some cases, these were reasonably resolved with quick troubleshooting, in other cases, they were less so. Online portals could not always keep up with the onslaught of applications, although usually they caught up eventually. The financial service providers could not always keep up with the pace of payouts and ran out of cash or saw long lines. The issues of digital divide, lack of financial and basic literacy, not speaking the official languages, people whose fingerprints do not scan well, and all the usual challenges were encountered, with responses sometimes impaired by the speed and/or low-contact way of working. Often emergency programs are done so fast and pass so quickly that neither impact evaluation nor much real-time monitoring can be done. Some reports of accounts of the kinds of issues and real-time troubleshooting that occurred are emerging, and many underscore the need in the long run to address some of the fundamental constraints in delivery systems that limited responses. For example, Gelb and Mukherjee (2020) and Palacios (2020) look at global responses; SPACE (2021) provides a bibliography of regional and country-specific materials; and others study individual countries, including UNECA (2021) for Namibia; Nishtar (2020) for Pakistan; and Cho, Kawasoe, et al. (2021) for the Philippines.

Client Interface: The Interaction between People and Institutions

There are many modalities or touch points for client interface with institutions. Various interactions occur in person with frontline workers. The location of the interactions can be people’s homes (via home visits by mobile teams), temporary community sites, permanent local offices, or

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specific points of service (including payment providers). Instead, interactions may occur digitally, via call centers, self-service kiosks in public spaces, mobile devices, personal computers, and so forth. Ideally, there are multiple channels to serve clients with different needs and constraints, with easy accessibility being the watchword—convenient hours; staff who are conversant in pertinent languages, well trained, able to handle the processes requested, and supported with adequate information systems; physical access where pertinent (including for the mobility impaired); and with reasonable amenities (protection from rain and sun, access to water and sanitation, and safe places for accompanying children).

In the era of COVID-19, concern about touch points went from the metaphorical to the physical/epidemiological, sparking a wave of adjustments to delivery systems. The use of digital delivery garnered huge impetus, with many countries pushing advances on several fronts. Some rolled out or reinforced electronic application processes. Many pushed harder on digital payments—changing regulations, opening accounts for new beneficiaries, waiving fees for accounts or digital transactions, raising limits on transactions, and so forth (Gentilini et al. 2020, v9). Where physical contact was still needed, countries generally declared social services centers as essential services and left them open, simultaneously making a range of efforts to reduce the chances of spreading the virus, for example, through increased sanitation measures, and spreading payments across more days of the month or more payment providers to reduce queueing and facilitate social distancing.

The impetus that COVID-19 responses gave to digital solutions reinforced the secular trend and may increase convenience for some social assistance clients, but there is a long way to go to bridge the digital divide. The countries that were best able to use digital enrollment and payment procedures in COVID-19 responses were those that had preexisting conditions, such as high-coverage foundational IDs, high-coverage social registries, linkable information from social security registries, and existing account-based or digital payments or amenable legislation that enabled a switch. Even so, while evidence on the extent of errors of exclusion from COVID-19-related digital systems is still scant, there is a great deal of evidence that documents the digital divide pre–COVID-19 (for example, ITU 2020; World Bank Group 2016). For example, in low- and middle-income countries, women are 8 percent less likely than men to own a mobile phone, 20 percent less likely to own a smartphone, and 20 percent less likely to use the internet on a mobile (GSMA 2020). Gender gaps in phone ownership are highest in South Asia—over 30 percentage points in India and 20 percentage points in Bangladesh and Pakistan (Bashir et al. 2021). Thus, as the motivation for digital services reverts from contagion control to efficiency and accountability, countries and programs will need to

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continue to help to raise coverage of IDs, payment accounts, and digital services for social assistance clients.

Maintaining some human help for potential registrants who lack access or acumen to use the digital platforms can be an important strategy. Physical offices, public access kiosks, and mobile outreach services will be needed for the many who do not have effective access to digital services—because internet services lack coverage or quality or are unaffordable, the potential clients do not own devices, they lack experience and agency to solicit government services digitally, or they face more basic barriers of literacy and language. The gaps in access in low-income countries are well known. Worldwide in 2019, 51 percent of people used the internet (ITU 2020). In African countries, the poorer 40 percent of the population is only one-third as likely to have access to the internet as the upper 60 percent; men and youth use the internet much more than women or older generations, and so forth. Similar gaps are found even in Europe—citizens in the top 20 percent of the income distribution in the most connected European Union (EU) country are 45 times more likely to use e-services than those in the bottom 20 percent in the least connected EU country (World Bank Group 2016). In South Asia, usage remains low, at around 10 percent in Bangladesh and 40 percent in Sri Lanka (Bashir et al. 2021).

On the institutional side, the interface with clients may be the local staff of the central social protection ministry (or wherever in the institutional landscape the particular program may be); municipal staff who carry out some program functions in joint implementation agreements with the central agency; or outsourced providers working on contract, such as notfor-profit social service providers or firms doing survey enumeration. In Mexico, the PROGRESA-Oportunidades-Prospera program was run with federal staff working throughout the nation. Using local governments to implement federal programs is more common. In China, the dibao program is administered by local civil affairs bureaus, with responsibility for determining eligibility, thresholds, beneficiary selection, and transfer payment amounts. In Brazil, the municipalities carry the workload of getting households entered into the social registry that serves as the gateway to dozens of programs. In Ethiopia, the district councils are important actors in the rural Productive Safety Net Program. Even in advanced countries such as the United States, local levels carry out important functions. Each arrondissement in France and county in the United States has at least one center with dedicated social workers ready to receive applications, conduct home visits, and give advice to people in need, as well as help with administrative procedures and refer clients to services that can meet their needs. Hence, the physical location of such services is important and spatial analysis can be useful in determining where to place capacity (see box 4.4).