Reaching the Poor with Poverty Projects: What is the Evidence on Social Returns?

Abstract

Although the consensus within the development community stresses the role of economic growth as a means of long-term alleviation of poverty, most governments and donors continue to fund measures to target the poor directly and to provide a social safety net to protect against adverse shocks. Such schemes can range from the provision of infrastructure, subsidized food, employment creation, access to health and other social facilities, microfinance and occasionally cash grants. Types of targeting include that by activity, such as primary health care and primary education, where it is established that the distribution of benefits tends to be progressive (so-called ‘broad targeting’), by indicator, where alternatives to income that may be expected to be correlated with poverty are used to identify the poor, by location, where area of residence becomes the criteria for identifying the target group, and self-targeting, where programs are designed to be attractive only to the poor. Insofar as these measures all involve the use of public resources to achieve benefits for a target group at or below the poverty line they can be thought of a ‘poverty projects,’ whose efficiency in principle should be amenable to formal quantification.