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.

With RHVP coming to a close at the end of 2011, we no longer have to worry about offending people ... something we have scrupulously avoided doing over the past six years! Given this license, RHVP's Programme Director, Nicholas Freeland, looks back over six roller-coaster years of promoting social protection in southern Africa. He concludes that donors and their development partners have done a lot to promote and support the significant advances made ... but that they could have done better. There is a serious, and continuing, problem that they divide into four competing camps, which his illuminated paper characterises as the "Four Horsemen of the Donor Apocalypse": the Productivists, the Ten-Percenters, the Instrumentalists and the Universalists.

This policy brief puts forward the case for a regional taxation on the extraction industry to fund a regional basic income grant as a form of a social protection floor that meets the needs of citizens and migrants. Given the increase in the interest around social protection programmes to address vulnerability in developing countries, the authors believe that it is an extremely opportune time to undertake a feasibility study on the development of a SADC-wide basic income payment to all residents, a form of social protection floor which has already been experimented with in a few localities in the region, funded from ring-fenced proceeds from extractive commodity operations within each country, with transparent operations and portable accessibility.

A number of successful pilot schemes in many countries, including Ethiopia and Kenya, have introduced the concept of index-linked weather insurance for small-scale farmers. This works on a simple theory: by insulating them from weather-related hazards that could adversely affect their outputs, index-linked weather insurance allows farmers to take risks and plant crops, knowing that they will get a return at the end of the season, whether it is in the form of a good yield, or a payout as compensation. As a result, index-linked weather insurance has been heralded as a successful mechanism of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation – and part of the social protection suite. But is it really sustainable in the long term?

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.

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.

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.