Social Safety Net
More budgetary funds on cards
With the government contemplating more budgetary outlay for expansion of social safety net programmes (SSNP), a research initiative was formally launched yesterday to find out the best modality to transfer assistance under such projects.
State Minister for Women and Children's Affairs Dr Shirin Sharmin Chowdhury launched the joint research initiative of UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the Washington-based think tank International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) at a hotel in the capital.
According to government statistics, Bangladesh provided 2.3 percent of its GDP and over 12 percent of its annual national budget to implement as many as 90 SSNPs, reaching the assistance in the form of cash, food, training and nutrition to six million ultra-poor families last year.
With the government's support, the one-year-long IFPRI-WFP joint study would assess the impacts of five different safety net transfer modalities on household income, food security and child nutrition. Commencing this May, the research will continue till mid-2013.
The research will try to identify which of the five transfer modalities, under which some 4,000 ultra-poor women receive a monthly assistance of Tk 1,500, best serve the purposes. The transfer modalities are cash-only, food-only, cash and food combined, cash and nutrition training, and food and nutrition training.
Dr Shirin said a move was underway to bring all SSNPs under one umbrella mechanism, create a central data bank and remove incidents of overlapping among the programmes.
Warning against feminisation of poverty in Bangladesh, she said, "Cash assistance might not be effective all the time particularly when the recipient women didn't have the right to take decision on how best they can spend the cash."
Dr Akhter Ahmed, chief of the party of IFPRI's USAID-funded Policy Research and Strategy Support Programme (PRSSP), said there were many safety net programmes in operation in Bangladesh but yet the total coverage of beneficiaries was not that large. "There are incidents of leakage, errors in targeting the right group of people as beneficiaries. There are poor left out of SSNPs while there are cases of inclusion of non-poor in the beneficiary lists of different SSNPs," he said.
WFP representative to Bangladesh Christa Rader and Disaster Management and Relief Division's Joint Secretary Fazlur Haque also spoke at the programme with Relief Division's Secretary Dr M Aslam Alam in the chair.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments