Evaluating Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net: Findings from the Midline Survey

Nina Rosas, Samantha Zaldivar, Maria Julia Granata, Gaew Lertsuridej, Nicholas Wilson, Albina Chuwa, Rainer Kiama, Mayasa Mahfoudh Mwinyi, and Asia Hassan Mussa

ABSTRACT

To reduce extreme poverty and break its intergenerational transmission, the Government of Tanzania created the productive social safety net (PSSN). The specific objective of the PSSN, which is implemented by the Tanzania social action fund (TASAF), is to increase income and consumption and improve the ability to cope with shocks among vulnerable populations, while enhancing and protecting the human capital of their children. This impact evaluation (IE) aims to contribute to the body of evidence on the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), particularly in the sub-Saharan Africa context. The IE design examines the impacts of a large-scale government program using an experimental design. While the baseline report of this IE assessed the PSSN’s targeting performance, the targeting aspects of this report focus on understanding whether recertification is appropriate at this stage. The baseline report provided evidence on how successful the three-stage targeting system - combining geographical, community-based, and a proxy means test - was at identifying the poorest households in Tanzania. This report also aims to identify key implementation factors driving the PSSN’s success and areas where the program can evolve further. The report is divided into following sections: section two gives introduction. Section three describes the context in which the evaluation is conducted. Section four presents the evaluation’s objectives, study design, and methodological issues related to the design. Section five presents in-depth the PSSN impacts on household beneficiaries using the midline data. Section six examines key program implementation aspects, such as the current performance of the targeting and payment systems and transfer adequacy, to identify whether the appropriate amounts are being delivered to the intended beneficiaries on time. Section seven concludes.