Bridging the Targeting Gap : Assessing Humanitarian Beneficiaries’ Likely Eligibility forSocial Protection in Iraq

In Iraq, the Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance programs have been instrumental in reaching thehouseholds most affected by the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in areas where the coverage ofthe government’s social safety net (SSN) programs remain limited. In the evolving context, however, short-termMulti-Purpose Cash Assistance programs will require eventual integration in some form with the government’s social safetynet programs to continue reaching vulnerable households affected by the conflict. As an initial step, this paperproposes an analytical pseudo-proxy-means test (PPMT) tool to bridge the targeting differences between the government’scash transfer program and the humanitarian Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance programs. Using the common proxies betweenthe cash transfer targeting formulas of the humanitarian agencies and the government, the pseudo-proxy-means testprovides each Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance beneficiary’s probability of being eligible for the government’s cashtransfer program under different expansion scenarios. When applied to the existing humanitarian beneficiary database,the results of the pseudo-proxy-means test tool suggest the potential for both significant referral numbers and a sequenced referral strategy.