Supporting the poor: sustainable safety nets for the new millennium

Policymakers have moved away from offering universal benefits to developing ways of protecting the poor against income fluctuations and livelihood shocks. What have we learned about the design, targeting and impact of social protection programmes? Should resource transfers be in cash or in-kind? Can we be sure assistance is sustainable?

A report from the Institute of Development Studies synthesises current thinking around protecting those left behind by the drive for economic growth. It attempts to move beyond the overly theoretical concerns in the growing social protection literature to examine impacts. The paper finds that social protection programmes have been too piecemeal and ad hoc to have a sustainable impact on poverty reduction. Only a handful of well-run and resourced social protection programmes (such as the social pension schemes in Namibia and South Africa or Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme) have managed to create assets and facilitate investment.

Targeting is problematic. Means testing of individual beneficiaries is shown to be difficult and expensive to implement. Such group demographic categories as female-headed households and the elderly are usually inaccurate proxies for poverty. Community-based targeting (getting communities to decide on eligibility for programme benefits) has only worked in those rare circumstances where there is sufficient transparency, information flow, accountability and an impartial external auditor.

The belief that cash given to poor people will be squandered on non-essentials is challenged. In several countries cash transfers have successfully enhanced access to food. Where commodity markets function efficiently it makes sense to provide cash and encourage trade. However, in places like the Horn of Africa, where rural trader networks and markets are poorly developed, giving cash risks only stimulating inflation.

Other findings include:

• Fears that targeted transfer programmes will crowd out and undermine well-functioning informal social nets are misguided.
• Food-for-work programmes rarely deliver promised benefits. Making undernourished women perform heavy physical labour inevitably reduces the net nutritional value of food or cash transferred.
• School feeding programmes enhance learners’ ability to concentrate in class, thus improving attendance and performance.
• Experience of Mozambique’s urban destitute programme highlights the general risk that obsessive donor concern with cost-effectiveness can so reduce the numbers of supervisory staff that corruption and leakage to the better off will result.
• Emergency social safety net responses by policymakers in the aftermath of the Asian economic meltdown generally had a limited impact on poverty.

Noting that we are still no nearer to definitive answers to policy dilemmas, the review recommends:

• more research to compare the full costs of targeted and untargeted interventions
• basing decisions about whether to prioritise cash or in-kind transfers on local economic conditions and preferences of intended beneficiaries
• responding to local requests for different resource transfers at different times of the agricultural cycle
• a much longer-term perspective when evaluating social protection programmes
• the need to recognise that investing resources in administrative staff and procedures is essential if programmes are to run well
• more realistic assessments of the long term political willingness and ability of poor states and donors to provide funds.

Source(s):
‘Social protection for the poor: lessons from recent international experience’, IDS Working Paper 142, Institute of Development Studies, by Stephen Devereux, January 2002 Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 27 May 2002

Further Information:
Stephen Devereux
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton
Sussex BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: 44 (0)1273 606 261
Fax: 44 (0)1273 621 202
Contact the contributor: S.G.Devereux@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

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'Can social safety nets contribute to poverty reduction in Africa?'

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Read the Global Poverty Report 2001 from the World Bank

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