By Nicholas Freeland
I very much enjoyed Stephen’s humble and courageous admission that he is a reformed poverty-targeter! And I admire his plaintive appeal to all deluded believers in poverty targeting: “please, look at the evidence”.
But I am not sure that evidence is the answer. After all, as Stephen says, many of the precepts of targeting the poorest “seemed logical”. Rather, I would like to begin with a quotation from Blaise Pascal, a French polymath from the 17th century, who wrote that “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point”: the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows nothing about.
To illustrate this, please allow me also to indulge in some personal reflections! Like Stephen, I have been working in social protection since it became fashionable in the early 2000s. At that time, I was Programme Director of the DFID- and AusAID-funded (as they were then!) Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP), promoting social protection across southern Africa. We were fortunate enough to have an extremely enlightened team,1 and we agreed from the outset that we would be guided by our principles. These were exciting times for social protection, and the final evaluation of RHVP by the Overseas Development Institute (cited in our Valedictory blog) found that “the Programme stuck to strong, clear messages on social protection and took an ‘uncompromising’ approach which sometimes involved controversial or critical stances. In many cases this drew defensive reactions, but over the course of the Programme, not only were many of those messages vindicated, but the messages delivered can be linked to a number of concrete policy changes”.
We did not approve of the Kalomo social cash transfer pilot that Stephen now admits to have been promoting to his DFID colleagues. First, we were opposed to all such pilots. We didn’t feel it was right to be “experimenting with the lives of the most vulnerable”, and we wrote a Comment (which would nowadays be called a Blog) arguing that: “A social protection pilot that comes into a community to try out a new form of transfer can undermine existing coping systems, build reliance on the new transfer and create expectations of future support. When the pilot comes to an end and if it is not brought into the mainstream of an adequately funded and properly managed on-budget programme, the beneficiaries may even be left in a more vulnerable state than before the pilot entered their lives”.
But, second and more importantly, we were viscerally opposed to the concept of targeting the 10% poorest, appallingly named the “non-viable poor”. You don’t need evidence to know that it is impossible to identify the poorest 10% (imagine trying to do that among a group of your friends or colleagues). You don’t need evidence to be certain that, even if you could, your assessment would change from one day to the next. You don’t need evidence to be aware that most of the 10% poorest in one district can be far better off than the 10% poorest in another district. You don’t need evidence to understand how damaging it will be to social cohesion to provide a cash transfer to one household and not to the near-identically deprived household next door. You don’t need evidence to recognise the stigma that might be attached to being categorized as “non-viable”. Your heart tells you all of this!
We had already written a general Comment “Missing the Target” which argued that “The sooner we … move to universal rather than targeted social transfers, the sooner social protection – in whatever guise – will have a genuine impact on poverty.” Then, as evidence started to emerge from Kalomo, and – horror of horrors – we found that it was to be carbon-copied in Mchinji, Malawi, we wrote a more specific Comment. This was called “One Out of Ten: Social Cash Transfer Pilots in Malawi and Zambia”, in which we argued that “we need to be honest enough to recognise the fatal flaw in the prevailing model: that community-based targeting of an inadequate 10% quota is an unacceptable model for national replicability in sub-Saharan Africa”. [I returned to the same subject, in a couple of blogs for Development Pathways: one on “Crocodiles and CROCO dials”, and another a spoof review of the World Bank’s 2022 “Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas”.]
Nor is it only in the area of poverty-targeting that you can usefully rely on instinctive gut-feeling rather than on rational evidence. From an early stage of RHVP, we were opposed to workfare programmes as a component of social protection. How can you possibly justify to someone who needs social assistance that they have to undertake labour-intensive public works in order to get it, expending valuable energy, incurring high opportunity costs, neglecting household responsibilities, sometimes taking children out of school, and so on. We wrote a couple more blogs on this too. One was specific to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (an aberration which continues to this day, and which I have again revisited in a blog called “Thidwick in Ethiopia”!), and one was a more general one called “Public Works Don’t”.
Similarly with the conditions that are sometimes attached to cash transfers. Again, our initial dislike of conditionality was instinctual rather than evidence-based. How is it possible to claim that you are providing social assistance, when you can punish beneficiaries by taking it away if they don’t behave as you ask them to behave? It should also be abundantly obvious that monitoring compliance with imposed conditions places an additional burden on already-overworked staff at schools and health centres. Much better to trust beneficiaries to do what is best for them, and to keep the system simple. [As another French polymath, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote, this time in the 20th century: “La perfection est atteinte, non pas lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à retirer” – perfection is attained, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.]
We wrote a series of blogs spelling out the shortcomings of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) under the slightly corny pseudonym of “Sissy Teese”; and an article in the IDS Bulletin which echoed Thomas Love Peacock’s assertion about the sugar trade in the West Indies that CCTs are “economically superfluous, physically pernicious, morally atrocious and politically abominable”.
It really staggers me, twenty years on, that we are still having to persuade unreconstructed poverty targeters that such targeting is an embarrassing dead-end, that workfare is as unacceptable now as it was in Victorian poor-houses, and that people should not be deprived of social assistance if they don’t meet arbitrarily imposed conditions.
I fear that evidence is not enough. So I end with a final quotation, from a contemporary and distinctly non-French polymath, Bruce Springsteen: “Come on and open up your heart”. In matters of social protection, please trust your instincts and do what your heart tells you!
