Icon Our WorkAnti-Social Registries: how a database excludes many from social protection

A craze sweeping the social protection world for Social Registries is systematically depriving some of the world’s poorest not only of social protection but also of access to vital services. So argues our latest publication, Anti-Social Registries: How have they become so popular?

Stephen Kidd, Development Pathways’ Senior Social Policy Specialist, says that selecting the beneficiaries of programmes from one database by ranking the poorest to the richest is based on impossible assumptions. He sets out evidence to demolish the claims of advocates of what he refers to as “Anti-Social Registries,” because they often exclude up to a half of all those entitled to social protection programmes.

This extends the negative impacts caused by the exclusion errors of using the Proxy Means Test for social protection cash transfers to essential public services such as health and education, he maintains.

He stresses that Social Registries are not to be confused with Single Registries, which simply bring together information from a range of social protection programmes.