Writer: Mostafa Shehata
Evaluations of social protection programs funded by the World Bank and the Egyptian government continue to focus on achievements while neglecting to calculate the impact of the programs themselves on changing poverty rates among Egyptians. Evaluations from independent think tanks may be better viewed as they discuss the achievements and outcomes of protection programs as opposed to the initial intentions of the programs.
Egypt adopted an economic reform program in 2014 to close the budget deficit, which resulted in an economic crisis that increased the country’s need for foreign exchange. Egypt entered a cycle of successive borrowing and inflation until the time of writing this paper. The Egyptian economic program was accompanied by rising prices in general and food commodities in particular, leading to an increase in the level of inability of poor families to cope with these increases. Despite this, the Egyptian government continues to implement economic reforms that it pledged to its lenders, led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by reducing the size of subsidies and increasing the number of families benefiting from social protection programs.
The World Bank provided a $400 million initiative to the Egyptian government to protect the most vulnerable, and through the Ministry of Social Solidarity, the social protection program “Takaful and Karama” was launched. Throughout the years of implementing Takaful and Karama, the Egyptian government has tried to avoid the issues of previous subsidy programs, especially those related to not reaching the actual beneficiaries. After years of providing in-kind support through many programs, most notably the commodity subsidy (Tamween), in which more than 60 million people are registered, the government tried to expand the use of cash transfers through the Takaful and Karama program to ensure that the support reaches the target groups. The results of multiple evaluations conducted on social protection programs, specifically Takaful and Karama, reflect the varying extent to which the programs show success or achievement of some targets and failure in others, depending on the evaluator and the evaluation criteria adopted.
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