Wahenga Comments
News
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3 Sep 2010IPS
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2 Sep 2010Reuters Africa
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1 Sep 2010Current Intelligence
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31 Aug 2010The Guardian
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30 Aug 2010IPS
Events
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2 Sep 2010 - 3 Sep 2010PEGNet conference on "Policies to foster and sustain equitable development in times of crises"Development Bank of Southern Africa, Midrand, South Africa
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20 Sep 2010 - 22 Sep 2010Millennium Development Goals SummitUN Headquarters, New York
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29 Nov 2010 - 4 Dec 2010World Social Security Forum 2010Cape Town, South Africa
Jobs
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International Policy Centre For Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), formerly known as the International Poverty Centre (IPC)Home-based (3 month contract)
Sissy Teese has taken up the gauntlet once again with the World Bank. This time, the object of her wrath is a new paper by the Bank entitled Rewarding STI Prevention and Control in Tanzania (with, according to Teese, “the horrendously contrived acronym of RESPECT”) which provides quarterly cash transfers, each equivalent to nearly one-tenth of average annual income, to those who avoid unsafe sex. Calling it “the most expensive condom in African history”, Teese questions the economic viability of this experiment.
Is there a link between social pensions and a decrease in the number of children born in sub-Saharan Africa? This Comment summarises the findings by Göran Holmqvist of the Nordic Africa Institute in a new paper which suggests there is.
Hot on the heels of RHVP’s meeting with IDS, ODI and DEV, which resulted in the joint statement on Social Protection in Africa: Where Next?, the Programme Director of RHVP, Nicholas Freeland, picks up on an errant formula which emerged at the meeting, was met with general derision, and was unceremoniously dropped from further discussion. But he sees some value in the equation, because it helps not only to understand the role of social protection in tackling vulnerability, but also to explain the difficulty of getting consensus on national social protection programmes in Africa. The equation is: vulnerability = poverty + risk – empowerment.
As RHVP - and perhaps Wahenga - draws to a close, I would like to use our pages to make a personal and heartfelt appeal to the social transfers community: please can we stop using the horrible word “conditionalities”?
Universal pensions have transformed the lives of older people and their families in countries in Latin America such as Brazil, Bolivia and Chile. HelpAge International supports the World Bank's recommendation, which can be found in its new working paper, that reducing old age poverty requires a different approach from other age groups and a minimum pension is a likely viable option.
In Sissy Teese's Connubial Cash Transfers? Comment, she complains that the authors of the World Bank’s recent Policy Research Working Paper (No. 5259) do not give enough prominence to two issues in their evaluation of the role of conditionality in cash transfer programmes, namely relative effects of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers on marriage and the mental health among adolescents. One of the authors of the Working Paper responds here, addressing this and other issues she complains about.
The World Bank’s recent Policy Research Working Paper (No. 5259) is another fascinating, meticulously researched and well-argued paper on the same cash transfer programme in southern Malawi that was cited in our earlier wahenga exchanges about the impact of conditionality on schooling - the Zomba Cash Transfer Program (ZCTP). But there are a couple of worrying findings which emerge from the Working Paper that shed further significant light on the debate on the relative merits of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers.
This Comment reports and reflects on the developments reported at a recent private sector conference on Banking and Mobile Money, and examines the implications of an increasingly plural financial services landscape for the electronic delivery of social cash transfers.
'Anonymous' comments on the continuing debate around unconditional and conditional cash transfers, as highlighted by Sissy Teese and the World Bank.
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… none of us believe that CCT are necessarily superior to UCT...
Is there a conspiracy afoot? Sissy Teese examines the World Bank's analysis of cash transfer schemes and asks whether evidence is being skewed in favour of conditional cash transfers, and the consequences of this on the continuing debate on the merits of unconditional and conditional cash transfers.
Bernd Schubert 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...
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...
Based on its experiences in southern Africa, RHVP has advocated forcefully on a number of fundamental principles for delivering sustainable social protection...
As a contribution to the ongoing debate about how best to target social cash transfers, this Comment responds to the Frontiers of Social Protection (FoSP) brief on poverty targeting, in which social cash transfer schemes in Ghana and Malawi are analysed, and follows Bernd Schubert’s earlier Comment, "Targeting Social Cash Transfers"...