How Can Vulnerable Internally Displaced Persons Be Transitioned from Humanitarian Assistance to Social Protection? : Evidence from Iraq
Aligning the short-term humanitarian assistance system with the government social protection system as a possible long-term solution for the displaced population is well discussed in the literature. However, there is limited evidence on how this al...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Papers |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099523406212233544/IDU0490e4323084e104adf08c7b02ee3f7cd869d http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37592 |
| Summary: | Aligning the short-term humanitarian
assistance system with the government social protection
system as a possible long-term solution for the displaced
population is well discussed in the literature. However,
there is limited evidence on how this alignment is applied
in a real-world setting. Using field-test data, this paper
documents the eligibility of the humanitarian Multi-Purpose
Cash Assistance beneficiaries for the government’s
poverty-targeted cash transfer program in Iraq. It does so
by using two possible approaches —a probabilistic
pseudo-proxy-means test, which is based on a limited number
of overlapping variables between the targeting models of the
humanitarian and government support systems and is designed
to be applied on the existing database, and a new data
collection with complete sets of variables from the
targeting models of the two systems. The paper finds that a
significant number of households that qualify for the
humanitarian Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance program are
eligible for the government’s cash transfer program. While
the referral accuracy of the pseudo-proxy-means tests model
is high, it is likely to leave out some eligible households.
In additions to identifying the cross-eligibility with
certainty, collecting new data may elicit important insight
related to willingness to be referred. The choice between
electing to collect new data or relying on the
pseudo-proxy-means tests and using existing data comes with
important trade-offs and will depend on the capacity,
budget, and appetite for the uncertainty of eligibility. |
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