Targeting versus social protection in cash transfers in the Philippines: Reassessing a celebrated case of social protection

This article provides a corrective to the dominant celebratory narrative about the conditional cash transfer programme in the Philippines, the Pantawid, and its associated social registry, the Listahanan. Based on extensive documentary analysis and fieldwork in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, we argue that the targeting system has in fact been unable to function according to its primary purpose of identifying the poor and providing them social protection, despite being celebrated precisely for this purpose. This has been partly – but not only – due to the increasingly obsolescent data of the registry, which the political system has been incapable of correcting, leading to stasis at a fairly low level of coverage, at a peak of about 19 percent of national households in 2014 and since subsiding to about 17 percent by 2020, with transfer amounts at a fraction of the food poverty line. This dysfunction has resulted in a quasi-permanent group of cash payment recipients, with little or no reflection of evolving poverty profiles. This revised reading of the Pantawid and Listahanan, in what might be considered as a strong case to examine social protection performance, brings us back to the perennial problems associated with poverty targeting in even best-case social protection programmes promoted by international donors and organisations.

Impact of aquaculture extension and training on livelihoods of the poor in Bangladesh - FTEP-II.

This case study describes an application of the sustainable livelihoods model as used by the Department for International Development, DFID, to a fisheries and aquaculture extension project in Bangladesh. Use of the livelihoods framework provided advisers, managers and national counterparts with a better understanding of the complexity of the poverty of the primary beneficiaries of the project (principally poor fish farmers and their families) and how the project interventions impacted their lives. Project impacts in terms of poverty targeting (impact on livelihoods assets), livelihoods strategies, policies institutions and processes and access and influence are described. Key issues in relation to the provision of extension services are presented.

Poverty in Monetary versus Non-Monetary Indicators in India: A Case of Alkire-Foster Methodology

ABSTRACT This study was undertaken to assess the poverty in monetary as well as non-monetary indicators in India. For this purpose, Alkire-Foster methodology has been used on the consumption expenditure data. Findings of the study revealed that incidence of poverty was the highest in the source of cooking fuel (68 percent) followed by deprivation in calorie intake (62 percent), ownership of land (53 percent) and education (53 percent) dimensions. Consolidated index of poverty, revealed that 34 percent of the Indian population was suffering from the multidimensional poverty and they were experiencing around 63 percent of the average number of deprivations. STs, SCs and labour households were in the most pitiable situation. Among three sectors of the economy, the majority of the poor population belongs to the primary and secondary sectors particularly those employed in construction, agriculture, forestry and fishing and mining and quarrying. Further, human capital, ownership of land and health dimension observed to be the major contributors to the incidence of multidimensional poverty. Targeting mechanism suggests that marginalised groups have a greater potency to reduce poverty at a higher rate.