Art Appraisal Blog

Countries worldwide are using social assistance payments as a component of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This briefing addresses how donors and their partners can design and implement social assistance payments that are efficient and secure while providing recipients with reliable, convenient, and safe access to their payments.

Many countries have launched unprecedented relief packages to cushion the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons from the COVID-19-related scale-up of social assistance can be harnessed by developing countries to rethink and strengthen the architecture of social protection systems in the future.

New or scaled-up COVID-19 social assistance in the form of cash transfers now reaches nearly 1.1 billion beneficiaries, one in every six people in the world. In a new CGD policy paper, we draw on early evidence from selected countries on the use of digital technology to implement these government-to-people (G2P) social transfer programs.

This Briefing provides guidance to policymakers to work with financial sector regulators and implement COVID-19 social assistance payments that facilitate rapid, remote account opening in compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules.

Around the world, women are being hit hard by the economic impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus). As the fallout from the pandemic deepens, so do the short and longer term effects on women's empowerment. The insecurity and lack of social protection that characterize informal, temporary, unpaid labor put millions of women and their families at extreme risk: in many developing countries, most women in paid work were working informally - around 95 percent in Asia and 89 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper summarizes the range of practice across jurisdictions that have employed a combination of SDD (also known as tiered CDD), licensing of non-bank financial institutions, and digital identification to enroll unbanked individuals into financial accounts so that they could receive COVID-19-related relief cash transfers.

Financial institutions and governments have been working for years to leverage digitized G2P for women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment. COVID-19 has increased the stakes, as governments look to use G2P programs to strengthen women’s resilience. New research from Women’s World Banking offers insights on Indonesia’s PKH program, the country’s largest conditional cash transfer.

Around the world, cash transfer programs are being implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. Pakistan introduced the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which requires mobile phones and national IDs to register. Using data from the 2018 Financial Inclusion Insights survey, we estimate large gender gaps in mobile phone ownership and national ID possession, leaving women are at risk of being disproportionately excluded from the program. To address this, the government should ensure women are more purposefully targeted, perhaps by reserving more slots for women or prioritizing women's registrations.

Social cash transfers to vulnerable households and individuals have been adopted at an unprecedented scale across sub-Saharan Africa. While most programs initially relied on manual cash disbursements, digital payment technologies have been on the rise since the early 2000s. Through a survey of 130 programs in 44 countries this paper offers a comprehensive overview of payment instruments and providers used in the region. Although cash continues to play a key role in the disbursement of social transfers, the adoption of electronic payments through private companies is increasing and further payment reforms and digitization efforts can be expected.

There’s a better way to deliver government-to-person (G2P) payments. Modernizing the delivery architecture can increase value for customers, increase customer choice, lower government costs and create competition among financial service providers.