Social programs in Bolivia are for the most part universal rather than selectively targeted. Eligibility for their benefits is based primarily on age, but may be denied persons who receive alternative benefits under social insurance. Even when they are not poverty targeted, programs could have systematic, computerized registries of beneficiaries for purposes of monitoring coverage, benefits, and demographic of social programs have no systematic, computerized registry of beneficiaries, which means that no government agency has ready access to comprehensive data on the actual coverage of social policies.
While the existing registries contain basic demographic information concerning personal identity, age, and sex, have no socioeconomic data on their beneficiaries, and this impedes proper monitoring and potential targeting of programs (the only social program that currently records any socioeconomic data is the Bono Juancito Pinto); The existing registries are not integrated, which limits centralized monitoring and strategic planning of social programs as a whole in terms of identifying individual beneficiaries and the package of services delivered to each household; associated with this problem is the fact that programs do not consistently record the national official identification document number as the only identification code for unifying and integrating the different registries; and (iv) current coverage of the existing registries does not include the potential beneficiary population of social programs.
Those registries exclude age brackets and socio-demographic groups that are not eligible under current programs (for example, men of working age or women who are not pregnant or have no children under two years of age, etc.) and all those potential beneficiaries of existing programs who for various reasons are not enrolled in those programs even though they are eligible (for example, because of self-exclusion, failure to meet enrollment requirements, or¿above all¿coverage shortcomings in the supply of those services).
