Concluding Remarks

494 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance

is done, the household’s income may be above the eligibility threshold because the household is still receiving transfers regularly according to the program rules and earning extra income from the small business (poultry). Should this case be tagged as inclusion error? Suppose that another household that has not been poor over the past years experiences an income shock a few days before the national survey data collection and the family has yet to apply for a social program to receive support. In the household survey data, the family will appear as poor and uncovered, an exclusion error, although it has not been erroneously deemed ineligible and it might even be too soon for there to be real concern that the household was excluded due to inadequate outreach or stigma and transaction costs. These two cases highlight the different issues between using static data from a period that is different from when the eligibility assessment was done to make conclusions about the accuracy of eligibility assessment.

Finally, household data are available only periodically and thus capture the welfare of households at a time different from that when eligibility assessments for any programs they benefit from would have been done.

Concluding Remarks

Several factors must be considered in conducting a proper assessment of the methods used to determine individuals’ or households’ eligibility for social assistance. It is important to relate data to the program design as closely as possible—using the eligibility criteria (income threshold, family composition, location, and so forth). Ideally, the assessment should use a range of measurements and consider the distribution over the whole population. Often it is important to triangulate among data from administrative records, random sample household surveys, process evaluations, or impact evaluations and to be aware of the limitations of any of these.