B6.11.1 Criteria for Selecting Beneficiary Households

434 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance

BOX 6.11 (continued)

Table B6.11.1 Criteria for Selecting Beneficiary Households

Basic Criteria for the Selection of Households

The following basic criteria should be used to select households for participation in the safety net program: • Households that are members of the community • Chronically food insecure households that have faced continuous food shortages (usually three months of food gap or more) in the past three years and that have received food assistance prior to the commencement of the PSNP • Households that suddenly become more food insecure as a result of a severe loss of assets and are unable to support themselves (over the past one to two years) • Any household without family support or other means of social protection and support.

Criteria for Refining the Selection of Households

Having made the initial selection based on the basic criteria, the following factors should be examined to verify and refine the selection of eligible households:

• Status of household assets: land holding, quality of land, food stock, and so forth • Income from nonagricultural activities and alternative employment • Support/remittances from relatives or the community.

Sources: MoARD (2006); Van Domelen and Coll-Black (2012).

handle grievances and appeals were established in the third year of the program, with additional efforts to strengthen transparency within the process in the later years through, for example, posting beneficiary lists and introducing social accountability mechanisms through nongovernmental organizations.

By the fourth year of program implementation, the evaluation showed that the program was well targeted within woredas (see table B6.11.2) and 85 percent of the survey respondents deemed the process to be fair. Periodic impact evaluation reports from 2006–14 show that PSNP benefit rosters have been to some extent dynamic, with both entries and exits, and 70 to 80 percent of the households from the first year of each evaluation period were still enrolled in the third year. The overall targeting of the PSNP is progressive and in line with results from other countries’ public works programs. Moreover, it was the selection of poor households within participating woredas that drove those results much more than the geographic targeting, as illustrated in box 5.3 in chapter 5.

In 2020, the government of Ethiopia decided to revise the community-based targeting process going forward. The program will

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