I have read with interest the recent articles from Sissy Teese and the World Bank on the relative merits of conditional and unconditional cash transfers, and I want to commend your website for giving space to this lively debate between “David and Goliath”.

In “The World Bank’s New Social Protection Model: Conspirational Cash Transfers”, Sissy Teese accuses us of being part of a conspiracy to promote CCT (as opposed to unconditional transfers, UCT) and manipulating evidence for that purpose. The reality is that it is her note that follows a conspirational approach whereby she distorts and manipulates evidence to, we can only assume, pursue an ideological agenda (promote UCT).

Is there a conspiracy afoot? Practitioners of social protection have long debated the relative merits of conditional and unconditional cash transfers. Now the World Bank appears to have introduced a third category. We label these “Conspirational” Cash Transfers: cash transfer programmes about which the evidence is either suppressed or massaged in a conspiracy to support the case for conditional cash transfers!

Bernd Schubert (Comment 27 October 2009) is remarkably sanguine about the problem of leapfrogging. The general assertion that “There is disappointment among those households that did not get in because of the 10 percent cut-off point and there is some envy. But there is no evidence of serious problems” is as far as we know contrary to the general experience of welfare schemes, where it has been found that people accept poverty targeting as long as the targeting is accurate and the amounts given are such that they do not allow recipients to leapfrog poor non-recipients.

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HAI - A social pension in Zambia.pdf

The Government of Zambia has been running a set of pilot cash transfers to test which could best form the basis of a national social protection system. The pilot being run in the Katete district transfers money to everyone over the age of 60 years, thus creating a form of social pension.

This brief outlines the perceptions of recipients, their families and the community towards the pension, and the impacts which have been observed on areas such as nutrition, health, education and the local economy. It also outlines the practical benefits and challenges of implementing the scheme.

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Malawi's Director of Social Protection, Mr Harry Mwamlima, and the Social Cash Transfer Secretariat Manager, Mr Reagan Kaluluma, have responded to wahenga.net's Comment "One Out of Ten: Social Cash Transfer Pilots in Malawi and Zambia", saying it has painted an extremely negative perception of the practical and conceptual design of the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCT).

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Source: International Labour Organization (ILO)

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This paper by Bernd Schubert examines the process of defining target groups and designing targeting mechanisms for the cash transfer scheme in Malawi, for which he acted as consultant. It argues that the scheme's approach of concentrating transfers on the ten percent of households that national survey data indicate are both "ultra-poor" and "labour-constrained", criteria for which are interpreted by local communities and District Assemblies in order to identify beneficiary households, is the most feasible and cost-effective means of tackling extreme poverty in Malawi.

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I think your latest Comment, 'Targeting Social Cash Transfers', is shaky, incoherent, defeatist, misguided and – in the final analysis – fatally flawed!

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The global community’s response to the challenges posed to low-income countries by the global financial crisis culminated with a commitment at the G20 London Summit to allocate US$ 50 billion "to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development". Some of these resources will be channelled through the ‘Rapid Social Response Program’, to be administered by the World Bank. This has reopened several debates in the social protection discourse, including the role of cash transfers and whether social grants should be targeted or ‘universal’.