wahenga.net promotes awareness and advocacy
on social transfers and social protection
in southern Africa
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This website aims to reach a wide and diverse audience and to encourage that audience to engage in the hunger and vulnerability debate by promoting awareness, understanding and advocacy on social protection and social transfers, as well as build knowledge and understanding of the multi-dimensional character of poverty, hunger and vulnerability across southern Africa.
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News
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5 Nov 2011Forbes
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4 Nov 2011StarAfrica.com
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3 Nov 2011Moneyweb.co.za
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2 Nov 2011AllAfrica.com
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1 Nov 2011thejournal.ie
As RHVP draws to a close, a recent assessment of the Programme, facilitated by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), attempted to learn lessons about the degree to which RHVP had influenced social protection policy over the six years of its lifetime. Two things are clear: we may have rocked the boat and ruffled a few feathers, but when all is said and done, we have also made a significant and positive contribution to the social protection debate. Our Programme Director, Nicholas Freeland, takes advantage of the opportunity of the lesson-learning report to pen a valedictory comment, and to thank those that we have worked with ... and tangled with ... over the years!
PMT is a curse! Sisters, you all know that: inescapable, debilitating, emotionally draining, a regular cause of extreme irritability!
But I refer here not to Pre-Menstrual Tension, but rather to a new form of PMT that is sweeping the globe: Proxy Means Testing. This variant of PMT is a method of selecting poor people to become beneficiaries of social transfer programmes, currently being advocated strongly by, among others, my good friends at the World Bank. But a recent paper, Targeting the Poorest, suggests that the reality is very different, and cautions policymakers strongly against the dangers of being steamrollered into the adoption of PMT. It suggests that the PMT approach is demonstrably deficient in many areas. This Wahenga Comment outlines those deficiencies.
In response to RHVP’s Nicholas Freeland’s latest Comment, Social Protection and the Four Horsemen of the Donor Apocalypse, Gaspar Fajth and Jenn Yablonski of UNICEF agree that better coordination among international development partners is necessary. But, they propose, what may be useful is to reflect on where these differences come from, and more importantly, how to move forward.