Building human capital is key to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. This is why much attention has been devoted to the role of social protection in the development of human capital, in particular conditional cash transfers (CCT), which target the poor with the primary objective of reducing poverty (World Bank, 2019). Human capital is an accumulated process of investments in education, health, and the acquisition of skills suited to the labor market. Investment in these three areas gives rise to a healthy workforce equipped with the technical and academic know-how needed in the labor market. In turn, this has positive implications for the economy, increasing productivity both quantitatively and qualitatively, creating jobs, and generating income, which also boosts consumption (UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 2018).&nbsp;
&nbsp;This brief attempts to analyze the role of CCT schemes in building human capital in health, education, and the acquisition of the technical and administrative skills needed by the labor market. In fact, the reliability of these types of CCT programs depends on their nature&mdash;that is, the conditions they set to ensure healthcare, proper nutrition, and education, all of which are fundamental for a workforce with the requisite cognitive and physical abilities to join the labor market. This paper will review evidence affirming the role CCT can play in building human capital, looking at experiences with CCT schemes in Brazil (Bolsa Familia) and other countries and offering suggestions to strengthen the Takaful program in Egypt to better contribute to the development of human capital. It will also consider some of the constraints that limit the effectiveness of CCT programs in this respect, thereby highlighting the considerations to be taken into account.
<h3>&nbsp;CCT Schemes: Restrictions and Guarantees</h3>
CCT programs cannot effectively build human capital in the absence of basic services like health and education, while ensuring their quality and access to them. Another key requirement is adequate labor conditions, which can be achieved by restructuring the informal sector and bringing it under a social protection umbrella, whether social insurance or comprehensive health insurance. None of this can be accomplished without specific public policies geared to these goals. Without these key conditions or requirements, CCT schemes become a constant threat to vulnerable and poor groups, spurring them to circumvent conditions, denying them their right to social protection, or encouraging only nominal compliance with the conditions of the scheme, which will not ultimately serve to build human capital.&nbsp;&nbsp;
<h3>Conditionality: Lessons Learned</h3>
Bolsa Familia, a CCT program to combat poverty in Brazil, began in 2003. The program set health and educational conditions for receiving assistance with the goal of building human capital, a significant step to human empowerment and liberation from poverty. Conditions include compulsory, scheduled vaccinations for children under age 7 and school enrollment for children of families benefiting from the program; monthly school attendance was also compulsory, at a rate of 85% for children ages 6&ndash;15 and 75% for children ages 16&ndash;17. The program further required pregnant and nursing women to regularly visit health units and encouraged them to breastfeed.&nbsp;
&nbsp;Compliance with these conditions was strictly enforced. A well-organized system was established for continual monitoring, through close cooperation between the health and education ministries and the implementing agencies, particularly on the local level, with local authorities playing a key role in monitoring. Bolsa Familia adopted several incremental measures to ensure compliance, starting with a warning to suspend assistance, followed by a temporary suspension from the program pending compliance, and finally exclusion from the program. Evaluations of the program in 2005 and 2009 found marked improvement in the health and educational indicators for beneficiary families, both in the same families over time and in comparison with families not enrolled in the program. These improvements include:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">A decline in premature births among pregnant women enrolled in the program, resulting from health care and follow-up care. In 2009, timely births were 14.1% higher among women in the program compared to pregnant women not enrolled. This improvement was attributed to the health counseling provided by the program.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The percentage of children over age 1 who were breastfed reached 95% in 2009.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The average height of five-year olds increased 51%.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">Vaccine compliance among families enrolled in the program increased from 79% in 2005 to 82% in 2009.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">Over-6 child mortality related to poor nutrition and diarrhea declined by 58%.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">School attendance for children ages 6&ndash;17 was 4.4% higher compared to families not enrolled in the program.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The program had a positive impact on educational advancement: promotion from one grade level to the next among enrolled children ages 6&ndash;17 was 6% higher than among those not enrolled.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The impact was greater for girls ages 15&ndash;17. School enrollment and attendance increased from 19% to 28% in this group.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The positive results of Bolsa Familia were not limited to these indicators. The program also increased participating women&rsquo;s capacity to share in household decision-making and reduced child labor as a result of regular school attendance (Gazola Hellmann, 2015).&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;As noted above, the ultimate object of investing in health and education is to create a qualitatively and quantitatively productive workforce. Preparedness to join the labor market is thus a key component of human capital, and labor market training programs are important mechanisms to achieve this. As part Uruguay&rsquo;s social protection program (Roman, 2019), a training program targeted youth in families receiving assistance, designed to incorporate them into the labor market. Government institutions responsible for youth, local authorities, and civil society all worked to implement the program to ensure accurate targeting and efficient monitoring. The plan adopted a clear vision of employment, seeing it as both an important component of empowerment and the end goal. One prong of the program focused on the private sector, which was encouraged to hire trained youth through an incentives program that covered a proportion of their wages; program offered greater wage support for women trainees, to encourage private employers to hire them. Also of relevance to building human capital, another prong of the program was geared to the development of a training methodology focused not on non-transferable skills&mdash;that is, specific skills linked with specific professions&mdash; but with transferable skills, which give job seekers more opportunities (Reuben et al., 2012).
<h3>&nbsp;Takaful CCTs: Horizons for Development</h3>
The Takaful program, designed and implemented in 2015, is a CCT scheme inspired by Bolsa Familia, but thus far the program has not enforced the conditions for assistance, although conditionality is a crucial part of the program design. Takaful was designed as a CCT scheme to provide income to support poor families with children under the age of 18. Families receive EGP325 monthly, with increases depending on the number of children and their level of schooling. A set monthly stipend is given for each child: EGP140 for children in secondary school, EGP100 for children in preparatory school, EGP80 for primary students; and EGP60 for children ages 5&ndash;6. As of January 2019, these terms apply to a maximum of two children, down from the three-child limit originally set to cover more poor families.&nbsp;
&nbsp;The program conditions include regular school attendance for children and periodic primary health-care visits for children and pregnant women. According to an independent assessment conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Takaful program has led to increased consumption (7.3% to 8.4%) among enrolled families compared to non-beneficiaries. Transfers constitute an average of 23% of a family&rsquo;s monthly expenditure. The program has also had a positive impact on nutrition for under-2 children, with an increase in weight-to-height ratio, a short-term indicator used to assess child nutritional status. Nevertheless, due to the absence of conditionality and the lack of effective coordination and implementation, the program has had no impact on school enrollment and attendance or on the provision of health services, particularly pre- and post-natal services (IFPRI, 2018). This is the result of a lack of guaranteed basic services coupled with poor quality and no guaranteed access.&nbsp;
&nbsp;Regarding labor market interventions, the Ministry of Social Solidarity oversees several economic empowerment initiatives, such as Fursa and Mastoura. Although theoretically Takaful beneficiaries belong to the groups targeted by these initiatives, practically speaking it is unclear how these groups are targeted and what impact the initiatives have given the lack of accurate information and assessment studies. In short, the lack of a strong, programmatic link between Takaful and economic empowerment initiatives undermines the Takaful program&rsquo;s ability to build human capital in this field.&nbsp;
&nbsp;Drawing lessons from the CCT schemes discussed above, the development of Takaful requires attention for suggested interventions:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">Since the assessment study found that transfers had a positive impact on child nutrition, this aspect should be strengthened, especially in light of price hikes for many basic goods and high-nutrition foodstuffs. Food vouchers could be offered, particularly to groups suffering from extreme poverty, which make up 6.2% of the population according to the 2018 Income and Expenditure Survey (Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, 2018). In fact, such an intervention could address the findings of the multidimensional poverty report, which concluded that nearly 30% of children suffer from multidimensional poverty and 21% from stunting, an indicator of poor nutrition (UNICEF, 2017).&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The program should require compliance with its conditions, which include regular school attendance and health care for children. These should be expanded to cover women&rsquo;s empowerment through literacy programs followed by labor market programs for women of various educational levels. This requires technical support for women in order to begin the process of empowerment.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">Action should be taken to improve the quality of basic services, especially health and education services, in order to ensure conditionality and hence realize the ultimate goal, which is the building of human capital.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;" aria-level="1">The informal sector&mdash;the primary employment sector for the poor&mdash;should be brought under the social protection umbrella, specifically through the extension of social insurance and health insurance. With effective monitoring and evaluation, better targeting, and improved coordination between ministries, this can be implemented more efficiently.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<hr>
References
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Roman, Howaida. (2019, December 26). <a href="https://aps.aucegypt.edu/en/articles/75/from-social-protection-to-social-justice-lessons-learned-from-uruguay">From social protection to social justice: Lessons learned from Uruguay</a>. Alternative Policy Solutions.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (2018). Key findings on income, expenditure, food subsidies, poverty indicators, and the poverty map 2017&ndash;2018 [Ahamm Nata&rsquo;ij Bahth al-Dakhl wa-l-Infaq wa-l-Da&lsquo;m al-Ghidha&rsquo;i wa Mu&rsquo;ashshirat al-Faqr wa Kharitat al-Faqr 2017&ndash;2018]. [In Arabic]&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Escudero, V., Lopez Mourelo, E., &amp; Pignatti, C. (2019, January). <a href="http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/worldbank_2019/escudero_v5422.pdf">Joint provision of income and employment support: Evidence from a crisis response in Uruguay</a> [Working Paper No. 41]. International Labor Office, International Labor Organization.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Gazola Hellmann, A. (2015, September). <a href="https://publications.iadb.org/en/how-does-bolsa-familia-work-best-practices-implementation-conditional-cash-transfer-programs-latin">How does Bolsa Familia work? Best practices in the implementation of conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America and the Caribbean</a>. Inter-American Development Bank.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">International Food Policy Research Institute (2018, October). Impact evaluation study for Egypt&rsquo;s Takaful and Karama cash transfer program.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Reuben, W., Miodosky, M., &amp; Watanabe, E. (2008, July). <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Building-on-Experience%3A-Improving-Social-Protection-Reuben-Miodosky/6a525223cabf071279998b63ce2106aefe6cfcf0#paper-header">Building on experience: Improving social protection in Uruguay and the plan for social equity</a>. En Breve, 132. World Bank.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2018). <a href="https://www.socialprotection-toolbox.org/files/documents/Social-Protection-module-1.pdf">Why we need social protection</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) (2017, December). <a href="https://www.unicef.org/MODA-Report-Full-EN-websingle.pdf">Understanding multidimensional poverty in Egypt</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">World Bank (2019, July 29). <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2019/07/29/build-employ-and-protect-using-social-protection-to-invest-in-people-in-a-changing-world#:~:text=The%20role%20of%20Social%20Protection%20in%20the%20Human%20Capital%20Project&amp;text=%22Strehttps://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2019/07/29/build-employ-and-protect-using-social-protection-to-invest-in-people-in-a-changing-world">Build, employ and protect: Using social protection to invest in people in a changing world</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">World Food Program (2020, March). <a href="https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000113930/download/?_ga=2.108783946.992306371.1610442382-245757333.1591265028">Maximizing social protection&rsquo;s contribution to human capital development</a>.</li>
</ul>

آراء

Commentaries

حماية اجتماعية

Read Also