Description

The Eligibility and Targeting Capability Area is a core strategic and operational function of the Social Registry (SR), designed to facilitate the efficient, accurate, equitable, and transparent assessment of potential beneficiaries' eligibility for social protection programs. Its primary purpose is to enable data-driven targeting, support program enrollment, optimize resource allocation, and ensure that social assistance reaches those most in need, making it a central function for realizing the SR’s core mission of inclusive and effective social protection.

User Journey

1. Users: Program administrators, eligibility officers, policy analysts, outreach teams

2. Process: Eligibility criteria configuration, poverty assessment, beneficiary ranking, eligibility determination, proactive identification, notification management

3. Business Process:

   • Administrators configure program-specific eligibility criteria and assessment methodologies

   • System automatically performs poverty assessments based on configured rules

   • Pre-assessment and ranking tools categorize potential beneficiaries by vulnerability level

   • Eligibility officers review assessment results and make eligibility determinations

   • Proactive eligibility identification mechanisms identify potentially eligible individuals

   • Automatic eligibility notification service informs potential beneficiaries of program eligibility

   • Policy analysts use eligibility data for scenario planning and policy simulation

   • Outreach teams target potentially eligible populations for enrollment campaigns

Links to Other Capability Areas

• Data Collection and Intake Capability Area: Relies on data collected at intake as the basis for eligibility assessments

• Data Management Capability Area: Requires clean, validated, and reliable data from Data Management for accurate eligibility determinations

• Interoperability and Integration Capability Area: Utilizes APIs for external eligibility systems to query SR data and for sharing eligibility results

• Reporting and Analytics Capability Area: Provides data on eligibility patterns, coverage, and targeting effectiveness for program analysis and reporting

• User Interface Capability Area: Provides interfaces for configuring eligibility criteria, reviewing assessment results, and managing eligibility notifications

Implementation Considerations

• Transparency and Fairness: Design eligibility assessment processes to be transparent, fair, and auditable, ensuring public trust and accountability

• Configurability and Adaptability: Build systems that can easily adapt to changing eligibility criteria, program rules, and policy priorities

• Assessment Accuracy and Validity: Carefully select and validate poverty assessment methodologies and eligibility criteria to ensure accurate targeting

• Data Privacy and Ethical Considerations: Implement robust data privacy safeguards and ethical guidelines for handling sensitive beneficiary information during eligibility assessments

• Integration with Outreach and Enrollment: Seamlessly integrate eligibility determination processes with outreach and enrollment workflows to facilitate efficient program uptake

• Progressive Refinement of Targeting: Plan for a progressive refinement of targeting methodologies, starting with basic criteria and gradually incorporating more sophisticated assessment tools as capacity and data availability improve

Relationship to Integrated Beneficiary Registry (IBR)

The SR identifies who might be eligible; the IBR manages who is actually enrolled and receiving benefits.

Progressive Implementation Path

For countries developing their social protection information systems, a progressive approach to implementing the Eligibility and Targeting Capability Area is recommended:

1. Basic Implementation: Start with the Configurable Poverty Assessment and Proactive Eligibility Identification to establish core targeting and eligibility determination capabilities

2. Enhanced Outreach: Add Automatic Eligibility Notification to improve proactive outreach and beneficiary awareness

3. Refined Targeting: Implement Pre-assessment and Ranking Capability Area to enable more nuanced vulnerability-based prioritization

4. Ecosystem Integration: Incorporate Eligibility Update Receiver and Dynamic Reassessment Trigger (in the SR context) to facilitate interoperability with broader eligibility frameworks and enable more dynamic and responsive eligibility processes

This phased approach allows social protection systems to gradually enhance their eligibility and targeting capabilities, starting with the most fundamental components for basic program enrollment and progressively adding more sophisticated functionalities as targeting strategies evolve, analytical capacity grows, and the focus shifts towards more proactive and dynamic social protection delivery. Prioritizing a robust and configurable poverty assessment methodology and proactive identification mechanisms from the outset is key to building an effective and equitable SR-based targeting system.