IDB.News Releases. Nov 23, 2011. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved a loan for $5 million that will help the government of Bolivia improve the quality and coverage of the registries of current and future beneficiaries of social programs, thanks to the development of a Master Registry of Beneficiaries Program.
The program seeks to unify the existing information in a master database in order to improve monitoring of the coverage of social programs and to broaden their scope by conducting a census that provides primary data. This will help to select program beneficiaries with poverty-focused criteria, by including information on aspects like gender and ethnicity.
The Master Registry of Beneficiaries will be used not only for poverty targeting, but also for monitoring the coverage of social policies and programs and identifying future social programs, which is vital given the conditions in Bolivia.
The development of a Master Registry of Beneficiaries in Bolivia represents a powerful planning and monitoring tool. It is expected to attain a database of households and their members, fed by existing beneficiary registries, to help verify the household’s participation in different specific social programs, demographic data and socioeconomic information in order to establish a classification of households according to their socioeconomic status, among other criteria.
Although the existing registries include basic demographic information for identification, age and gender, they lack socioeconomic data on their beneficiaries. This hampers options for monitoring the coverage of programs from the central level to the local level and the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the population served by the programs. It will also make the identification of their beneficiaries harder.
The Ministry of Development Planning will be the implementing agency and will put into effect the program through the Master Registry of Beneficiaries Project, reporting directly to the Deputy Minister of Planning and Coordination.
IDB financing for this program is made up of a loan for $3.75 million in Ordinary Capital from the Bank at a 30-year term, with a 6-year grace period at a LIBOR interest rate, plus a loan for $1.5 million from the Fund for Special Operations at a 40-year term, with a 40-year grace period and an annual interest rate of 0.25 percent
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