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Community-Based Targeting
How to Harness the Power of Data and Inference | 433
BOX 6.11
The Ethiopia Rural Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) uses community-based targeting to choose the households within the districts (woredas) and subdistricts (kebeles) where the program works up to the caseload allocated to the area. (Box 5.3, in chapter 5, explains geographic targeting.) The process has undergone continual scrutiny and the program has worked on improvements, highlighting a core message of this book—that targeting is not perfect or easy, but effort can often improve it.
In the PSNP, the process of selecting beneficiary households is run at the community level, carried out by the Community Food Security Task Forces, which are specified in the project implementation manuals as being comprised of a development agent, a health extension worker or volunteer community health worker, a Community Care Coalition representative, two or three elected female representatives, two or three elected male representatives, an elected youth representative, and an elected representative of the elders. The job of these task forces is to (1) identify eligible participants based on guidelines and training received from the kebele (see table B6.11.1); (2) identify households that can participate in public works and those without labor or other support that will need direct support; (3) display the proposed list of participants in public for at least a week, for comments and endorsement by the general meeting of the village residents; and (4) finalize the list and pass it to the Kebele Food Security Task Forces for verification and further action.
The early years of implementation experienced some common teething pains, which were addressed through capacity building as the program developed. The caseload identified was initially higher than the rationed allocations, but the program accommodated this with an increase from the originally planned 5 million to 8 million beneficiaries. Understanding and implementation of the guidelines were initially not uniform, but they improved in subsequent years after increased communication with regional and district staff and communities. In the early years, there was some tendency to dilute benefits through incomplete listing of all family members (so that more families could fit within the rationed caseload) or families being rotated in and out of the program within a year. Both of these were reduced when the automated Payment and Attendance Sheet System was introduced. Committees to
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