Child-centred social protection
15 July 2009
Michael Samson
[email protected]
Economic
Policy
Research
Institute
UNICEF/
IDS
Course on
Social Protection
Overview
Why child-centred?
– UNICEF
– the socio-economic returns
The instruments
– Fee waivers for services
– Cash transfers
Conditionality?
Expanding the concept of child-centred
social protection
What does social protection do?
 Focus area
1. Young child survival and development:
poverty reduction, nutrition, health
 Focus area 2. Basic education and gender equality:
school attendance, particularly for girls
 Focus area 3. HIV/AIDS and children: support for
caregivers and AIDS-affected households
 Focus area 4. Child protection from violence,
exploitation and abuse: reduced child labour
 Focus area 5. Policy advocacy and partnerships for
children’s rights
Biological transmission mechanisms of social protection
Binocular vision
‘Sensitive periods’ in early
Central auditory system
brain development Habitual ways of responding
Language
Emotional control
Symbol
Peer social skills
Relative quantity
High
Low
0
1
2
3
Years
4
5
6
7
High rates of return on social transfers result
from their tendency in many countries to
provide pre-school children with vital resources
Pre-school
Intervention
Brain
Growth
Schooling
Job Training
Human Capital Rates
of Return
Pre-school
Post-School
School
Age
Heckman & Carneiro (2003) and Handa (2007)
Vocabulary scores by SES quartiles in 36 to 72
month old children Ecuador
age (months)
Source: Paxson and Schady (2005) reported in Handa (2007)
.8
.9
1
South Africa KIDS 1993-1998 Panel: Prior
malnutrition affects school enrolment
.7
95%
enrolment
.4
.5
.6
70%
enrolment
-5.00
-4.00
-3.00
-2.00
-1.00
0.00
1.00
Height for age z-score 1993
2.00
3.00
Height-for-age Z-scores in 1993
Fig. 2: Lowess estimates of ever enrolled and nutritional status
Source: Handa (2007)
4.00
Social services
Many child-centred social protection
interventions will be covered next week
But how do cash transfers relate to social
service delivery?
Cash transfers + fees for most vital services
(health, education, water) = inefficiency
School fee abolition is affordable and has
significant impacts on the poor
 On average primary school fees account for no more
than 5% of the total cost per child – this cost is widely
affordable for governments.
 School attendance of the poor is very sensitive to
even low fees. The benefit to waiving fees outweighs
the cost.
Evidence from Africa demonstrates a substantial
impact on primary school enrolment from
abolishing school fees (SOURCE: UNESCO, UKWP2006)
Recent evidence from Kenya’s Joint
Poverty Assessment corroborates this
Age
Abolishing school fees only one part of
social protection strategy
 Getting children admitted is not the only challenge to
reaching Universal Primary Education (UPE).
 Other key challenges to achieving UPE include:
– Enrolling the last 10-15% of children, largely in rural
areas. This challenge is compounded by the rapid
increase in HIV/AIDS orphans.
– Reducing the drop-out rate
– Improving learning outcomes
 These challenges require that school fee abolition is
accompanied by other social protection measures such as
cash transfers and school feeding programmes for
marginalised children
Impact of social cash transfers
Empowerment
Upliftment
Health,
education
Access to
markets
(nutrition)
Most cash transfers buy predominantly food
Use of Cash Transfer by Program
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Food
SOURCE:
IFPRI
Education
Health
South Africa OAP
Kenya Cash Transfer for OVC
Namibia Old-Age Pension (urban)
Malaw i FACT
Other
Zambia SCTS
Mozambique INAS (urban)
Malaw i DECT
Savings &
Investment
…and other health outcomes
Change (percentage points)
70
60
50
Honduras
40
Mexico
30
Nicaragua
20
Colombia
10
0
-10
-20
Health visits
SOURCE: IFPRI
Illness
Growth
monitoring
Stunting
…and significant educational impacts
(particularly in cases where initial enrolment is low)
SOURCE: IFPRI, EPRI, UNICEF
Group exercise (for this afternoon)
 In groups, each person discusses for a country they select:
– First, do we have the information necessary to answer
these questions? If not, what kind of information would
be required to answer each question?
– Second, what kind of child-centred social protection
programme do we want to implement?
– Should it be targeted? If so, how?
– Should it be “conditional”? If so, on what and how?
– How does the programme fit into the larger social
protection picture? What complementary programmes
are necessary?
Institutional and policy context
How do you
design a
child-centred
social
transfer
programme?
Programme
selection involves
answering key
questions:
Political priorities
•Targeting?
Who benefits?
? Social protection
? Human capital
development
? Priority groups
1
? Vulnerable groups:
older people,
disabled, children
? Poor households
more broadly
3
Poverty profile
•Who benefits?
•Transfer size?
Decisions to define instruments
2
How much
money is
available ?
for
social
transfers?
? Domestic resources
? Donor funds
Institutional
factors
? Existing programmes
? Government capacity
? Fiscal position
4
What size of
transfer is
provided?
5
What kind of programme?
 Unconditional programme?
– Social pension?
• South Africa model?
• Lesotho model?
– Household grant?
• Kalomo?
• Mchinji?
 Conditional cash transfers?
– Unconditional programme + conditionality
– Mexico or Brazil? Kenya, Pakistan or Zambia?
 Public works programme?
 Micro-finance, school feeding, inputs?
Identification of the beneficiary
 We often define social transfer programmes in terms
of the beneficiary
–
–
–
–
social pension (older people)
child benefit (children)
food subsidy (hungry people)
geographically located people (poverty and vote mapping)
 The political and policy context for beneficiary
identification
 The role of the poverty profile
 Institutional factors and existing programmes
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cameroon
Cote d'voire
Ethiopia
Older people & children
Gambia
Elderly and children
Ghana
Only older
people
Elderly
persons
Guinea
No elderly persons
Households with
older people and
children are on
average poorer
than other
household types
in most African
countries
No older people
Kenya
Madagascar
Malaw i
Mozambique
Nigeria
Uganda
Zambia
AVERAGE
0
10
20
30
40
50
depth of poverty (poverty gap %)
60
SOURCE: Kakwani and
Subbarao (2005)
Poverty rate (in percent of the population in each group) and change (in
percentage points)
Tanzania: the potential impact of a social
pension and a child benefit
57.8
60
52.5
50
44.3
44.1
40.8
40
30
27.1
28.8
28.0
43.2
42.6
38.1
37.9
25.9
37.7
37.3
28.5
28.4
27.6
31.8
22.0
18.9
20
15.2
10
0
-10
-10.5
-14.7
SOURCE: ILO
Old age pension and child benefits (orphans 0-14, others 6-14)
-25.9
Change in poverty rate
Living in hh
without ablebodied member
-24.0
Living in hh with
children and
elderly
Working-age
men (15-64)
Working-age
women (15-64)
Boys (0-14)
Girls (0-14)
All individuals
Actual poverty rate
-22.5
-15.3
Living in hh with
elderly (65+)
-23.7
-30
Living in hh with
children (0-14)
-12.0
Elderly men
(65+)
-16.3
-15.3
Elderly women
(65+)
-20
-13.7
Secondary Beneficiaries of Social
Pension Income in Namibia
Others 6%
Spouse 9%
Children 25%
Grandchildren
55%
Parents 5%
SOURCE: Devereux (2007)
Public works programmes
Public works
programmes
are conditional
cash transfers
— where the
conditionality
is work
Key considerations
 High wages almost always make it difficult to target
the poor, but low wages don’t necessarily make it
easier
– …and low wages erode the social protection
 To transfer one dollar to a household costs between
$2.50 and $5.00
 The best programmes combine four elements:
– High labour intensity
– Substantial pro-poor value-added from the project
– Effective targeting of poor households
– Workers employed in a way that does not erode
their ability to fulfill their other obligations
Conditional cash transfers:
where are they found?
Source: Kathy Lindert (2005)
Social transfer programmes can
include any of five possible elements
Unconditional
social
transfers
Conditional
cash
transfers
Income (poverty reduction)
Yes
Yes
Improved service delivery
Maybe
Maybe
Developmental awareness
Maybe
Maybe
Monitoring
Maybe
Maybe
Penalties
No
Yes
Element:
NO
Are there backlogs in
delivering social services?
YES
YES
Does government have strong
administrative capacity?
NO
NO
Do the poor face bottlenecks
in accessing social services?
LOW
Is the unemployment rate
relatively high or low?
YES
HIGH
UNconditional
conditional
What factors affect the choice of conditional
versus unconditional transfers?
Are conditionalities necessary?
Evidence
Philosophical underpinnings
Risks
– compromise the poverty reduction objective
– deprive the poor of freedom to choose appropriate
services — and to freely make decisions to
improve household welfare
– can be expensive, inflexible, and inefficient — in
the worst of cases, screen out the poorest
Conclusions
Social protection must be child-centred
A variety of appropriate instruments are
essential—rarely does one intervention work
optimally on its own
Cash transfers are a historically under-utilised
instrument that can promote developmental
outcomes
A broad conception of child-centred social
protection can help to break the chains of the
inter-generational transmission of poverty