Implementation of community-based targeting mechanism: a local perspective in Lindi district, Tanzania

Abstract

Deciding on which poor households' targeting mechanism is appropriate has always been a challenge to policymakers. Given the challenge, Tanzania adopted Community Based Targeting (CBT) for poor households’ cash transfer programme. The design was expected to increase the legitimacy of the programme at the local level, though it is exposed to elite capture and information distortion, which may, in turn, negatively affect the legitimacy level of the programme. This paper assesses community perceptions of the CBT Mechanism in Lindi District and determines households’ factors influencing community perception of the transfers. Likert scale data were collected and analysed using factor analysis, ordinal logit regression and the Mann-Whitney U test. The community perceived the performance of the mechanism as average, although complaints of exclusion and inclusion errors were reported. The threshold set by programme design, information distortion and other implementation flaws were blamed for such errors. Moreover, the paper indicates that the sex and participation status of respondents influenced the community's perception of the CBT mechanism. Beneficiary households were more likely to be aware of the villages’ meetings conducted to nominate eligible households than non-beneficiary households. The study recommends that programmes for targeting poor households should be designed in a way that the criteria set for households’ participation are matched with the available resources. Moreover, the study suggests modification of the Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) operational manual (URT, 2013) so that community actively participate in selecting and scrutinizing eligible households by removing the exclusion mandate from the hand of the Community Management Committee (CMC).