FIGURE 2.10: Share of Connected and Nonconnected Individuals, by Urban and Rural Location
100 80 Percent
While digital readiness is improving, uneven access, especially between urban and rural areas, remains an issue.
60 40 20 0
Rural
Urban
Benin
Rural
Urban
Côte d’Ivoire
Rural
Urban
Guinea-Bissau
Rural
Urban Mali
Connected
Rural
Urban
Niger
Rural
Urban
Senegal
Rural
Urban
Rural
Togo
Urban
WAEMU
Not connected
Source: Rodriguez-Castelan et al. 2021. Note: WAEMU = West African Economic and Monetary Union.
A hybrid approach can combine the strengths of new and old methods to build the next generation of social protection delivery systems in Africa and the developing world. A combination of methods is most likely to increase the reach of adaptive social protection programs by designing delivery systems that are better integrated, more inclusive, and more dynamic. For instance, articulating the development and rollout of foundational ID and social registry platforms shows great promise, which is currently being explored in Togo. This would imply conducting a joint registration campaign that simultaneously provides a unique identifier to all individuals in the territory through the foundational ID, while also capturing minimal and self-reported household socioeconomic attributes to populate the core data structures of the social registry needed to establish a baseline welfare assessment. Periodically updating the baseline welfare assessment would be done through multiple channels, including remote (when viable) and in-person (when not) on-demand intake modalities. Furthermore, nontraditional and passively generated data, such as CDRs or other available transactional data, could potentially be used to complement the self-reported socioeconomic attributes and obtain more robust and dynamic welfare estimates. Combining true and tested approaches with novel ones requires designing forward-thinking delivery systems that are grounded in today’s constraints while keeping track of the potential of new technologies in a responsible manner. As such, investing in social protection delivery systems pays off as they provide a platform that can be harnessed by multiple interventions across sectors.
Direction 3: Enhancing Financing for Wider Coverage and Greater Shock Responsiveness Despite tight fiscal space in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, there is scope for enhanced investment in stronger social protection systems. Ballooning debt (historic and pandemicinduced) has increased fiscal pressures across the region (IMF 2021). Between 2014 and 2019, debt as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 20 percentage points in SubSaharan Africa, but in 2020 alone, it increased by 7.5 percentage points to 63.1 percent. Coupled 104
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A F R I C A’ S P U L S E
