Over the past two decades, government-to-person cash transfer programs have become common in many countries as a means of addressing chronic poverty and insecurity for low-income and poor households. However, adequate financial knowledge and skills - the key factors of financial capability - are...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in vast numbers of people in need of social assistance, many of whom were not previously covered by social safety nets. To meet this unprecedented level of need, governments quickly scaled social assistance reaching over 1.7 billion people in low- and middle income...

Upon request of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Principals at their meeting on December 11, 2015, the World Bank agreed to coordinate a process of reviewing key issues and options for significantly scaling up the use of multipurpose cash transfers (MPCTs; including digital cash and...

Since 2010, the Government of Indonesia (GoI) has set official poverty reduction targets and emphasized the importance of a well-functioning social assistance system in continued poverty reduction. However, despite the efforts in expanding coverage of the social protection system, the pace of...

The report focuses on the social safety net, particularly cash and in-kind transfers. The safety net can play an important role in addressing poverty and vulnerability; however, the process by which the safety nets have been developed in Swaziland has produced a fragmented system that leaves...

The Social Assistance Scheme (SAS) is the main social assistance program in Kosovo and the sole program targeted at poverty reduction in Kosovo and, importantly, the only program in which household income and assets are used to identify beneficiaries. In the absence of SAS, the overall poverty...

This report presents the results of a diagnostic study on the targeting of social protection programs in Uzbekistan with a specific focus on low-income family allowances. The objective is to determine the extent to which current programs are reaching the poor and can reduce poverty, and...

The main objective of this technical note is to evaluate the institutional and implementation framework needed for strengthening payment systems as a core element of delivering social protection and labor (SPL) benefits to the poor, around which targeting, identification and monitoring systems...

This report profiles poverty and assesses the performance of the social assistance (SA) system in the Turkish Cypriot community (TCc). The aim of this report is to provide information and evidence-based analysis to policy-makers on the determinants of poverty in the TCc and on the effectiveness...

The development of Brazil's modern social safety net is quite recent, and social assistance programs claim a relatively small share of resources of the broader social sector. A key feature of the Brazilian social protection system is the duality between formal sector workers, who gained social...