A Household Survey to Assess the Exclusion Error from Old-age and Widow Allowances

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About the project

The old-age allowance (OAA) and the Allowance for Widow, Deserted and Destitute women (WA) programs are two important social protection schemes in Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh (GoB) has not been able to attain a comprehensive coverage of beneficiaries under these two (along with many others) schemes. That is, there are eligible beneficiaries that remain outside these schemes. Lack of financial resources is seen as one main reason for this. In FY 2020-21, under an Asian Development Bank (ADB) loan-supported program, the government made a commitment to expand OAA and WA programs in 112 most poverty-stricken upazilas (administrative units) to achieve a comprehensive (100%) coverage. Under another ADB policy-based lending (PBL) for FY21-22, the government committed further to attaining such coverage of the same two programs in additional 150 upazilas. Therefore, as part of ADB lending schemes, all eligible OAA and WA beneficiaries in 262 most poverty-prone upazilas should receive the relevant monthly social protection transfers. It is worth mentioning that Bangladesh has a total of 495 upazilas and all of them have OAA and WA in operation without comprehensive coverage.

The principal objective of this study is to assess if the implementation actions undertaken by the GoB, under the ADB PBLs, are attaining a comprehensive coverage of eligible elderly citizens and women under OAA and WA programs. Such coverage of all eligible beneficiaries will ensure eliminating exclusion errors from these programs. The study also analyses the poverty incidence among the eligible beneficiaries under these two programs. As part of the project, RAPID administered a questionnaire survey of 2,656 households from randomly selected 25 PSUs from 15 upazilas during November-December 2021.