By Jenneh Braima
The National Commission for Social Action (NaCSA) is presently verifying 13,000 poor homes in four districts it has identified across Sierra Leone as “extremely poor households” for a 2-year project called: ‘Social Safety Nets Cash Transfers.’
The project entails cash transfer in the form of small and regular payment that will help beneficiary households to stabilise their basic consumption and avoid having to resort to negative coping mechanism when shocks occur.
A NaCSA news update of February 10 cited ‘the Statistics Sierra Leone Integrated Household Survey’ which indicated a “disproportionate poverty situation” in these communities.
Through a US$7 million grant from the International Development Association, the development arm of the World Bank, this project is meant to help the country set up the “building blocks” for a nationwide social safety net system that can be used to deliver cash transfers to the poorest households, enabling them to buy food, send children to school, and protect assets such as livestock.
According to the Bank, this phase of the project is supposed to be a pilot programme. The plan is to eventually scale it up to all 14 districts of the country.
Beneficiaries will come from Timdale and Kowa chiefdoms in Moyamba, Toli and Mofindor in Kono, Tambakha and Magbaimba Ndowahun in Bombali District and Western Rural District.
The whole idea is to increase access to services that promote human capital accumulation, including health, education and nutrition, among others. It also seeks to “support livelihood enhancement and productivity by facilitating the creation of productive assets.”
Abu Bakarr Conteh, Public Relations Officer of NaCSA, tells Politico that in March each beneficiary household in the four districts would begin to receive Le65, 000 per month for two years. But he said they would do the cash transfer “quarterly,” meaning that every household would receive Le195, 000 every three months.
NaCSA however is concerned, as indicated in an outline of the project document, that cash transfers is a relatively new phenomenon in Sierra Leone and that supply of social services may not always be adequate in the poorest communities the project had targeted.
“The programme will include only soft conditions, namely community meetings to reinforce human capital investments, especially those related to maternal and child health and education,” the document reads in part.
The payment, it adds, would be made to female heads of the households. The World Bank says the decision to pay the money to women is because they tend to spend money in ways that benefit the family.
But while the target communities have lauded the move, many are urging NaCSA to increase its efforts in the poverty alleviation drive. Some say the Le195, 000 quarterly payments are inadequate to address their needs.
The Lumpa community in Waterloo, in the Western Rural district, is an epitome of poverty in Sierra Leone. Fatmata Bangura, a 29-year-old mother of three boys and a girl, is shy to name the business she does. She says she only helps her agemates with their domestic chores who in turn give her food which she takes home to her children. Bangura`s husband is jobless and they are living together with her mentally retarded mother-in-law.
“If they give me the money I will use it for food,” she tells Politico, adding that none of her children, aged between six months and seven years, has ever been to school.
“I need somebody to help me send them to school,” she pleads,while wondering whether Le195, 000 in three months.
Balu Conteh, a middle-aged window, and her three children have just been evicted from the single room they were occupying because she cannot pay the rent that has been increased from Le180, 000 to Le240, 000 per year. Conteh`s husband died two years before of tuberculosis. The single-parent family is only now being housed by kindhearted people.
“But we move from one place to another,” the woman laments.
In this condition, Conteh says, the 195, 000 NaCSA handout will be “small” to provide food and address their health and educational needs.
The widow pleads with the commission to increase the amount “or pay school fees for our children in and provide free health care for them.”
Youth in Action for Development (YAD) is a newly created youth organization in the Lumpa community. Its members hail the NaCSA “gift”. But its public relations officer Mohamed Sulaiman Kargbo has some concerns.
“School materials are very expensive and to even gain admission to school is something else,” Kargbo says.
These concerns of the Lumpa community people were put forward to the NaCSA spokesperson Abu Bakarr Conteh. His response is that the project will provide training for “microenterprise skills” to enable beneficiaries transform the said amount into businesses which they hope will address the nutritional, health and educational needs of the people.
Conteh says the project “is not to completely eradicate poverty” and that it’s just a help the sponsors are rendering.
© Politico 19/02/15
