Tajikistan - Delivering Social Assistance to the Poorest Households
2011
World Bank
During the food, fuel, and financial crises of 2008 and 2009, the Government and donors found themselves without an effective mechanism for channeling assistance to the poor. In 2009, the Government of Tajikistan asked the World Bank to support improvement of its system of social assistance. The World Bank prepared this report to inform its technical and financial support for improvement of social assistance and also to define an initial mechanism for delivering benefits to the poorest households. At present, Tajikistan's system of social assistance exerts almost no downward influence on poverty rates. This note sets forth the case for reform and then presents some specific technical proposals for reforms. To trace the path to reform, this report starts with an assessment of the present system. The other main social assistance program is compensation to needy families whose children attend school. This program pays benefits to selected households if their children enroll in and attend school. The size of the benefit is negligible and is judged too low to influence school attendance. An important step in the reform will be to consolidate the two main social assistance programs, and if possible, all the programs, and replace them with a single targeted social assistance benefit program. This will improve targeting by decoupling social assistance from consumption of electricity and natural gas. This is important since some very poor people live in isolated mountainous areas where they are not connected to the electricity and gas grids, and thus would not benefit from these compensation transfers. This report presents proposals for scoring formulas (drawn from proxy-means tests) for urban and rural areas, based on data on the characteristics of households and observable proxies for consumption. Empirically, the most important household characteristics for predicting consumption are the number of children, the number of family members, and the oblast of residence.
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