INTEGRATED SAFEGUARDS DATA SHEET APPRAISAL STAGE Report No.: ISDSA7061 Public Disclosure Copy Date ISDS Prepared/Updated: 27-Jan-2014 Date ISDS Approved/Disclosed: 27-Jan-2014 I. BASIC INFORMATION 1. Basic Project Data Country: Burkina Faso Project ID: P124015 Project Name: Social Safety Net Project (P124015) Task Team Azedine Ouerghi Leader: Estimated 27-Jan-2014 Estimated 23-Apr-2014 Appraisal Date: Board Date: Managing Unit: AFTSW Lending Specific Investment Loan Instrument: Sector(s): Public administration- Other social services (30%), Other social services (70%) Theme(s): Social safety nets (80%), Other social protection and risk management (10%), Nutrition and food security (10%) Is this project processed under OP 8.50 (Emergency Recovery) or OP No 8.00 (Rapid Response to Crises and Emergencies)? Financing (In USD Million) Public Disclosure Copy Total Project Cost: 50.00 Total Bank Financing: 50.00 Financing Gap: 0.00 Financing Source Amount BORROWER/RECIPIENT 0.00 International Development Association (IDA) 50.00 Total 50.00 Environmental C - Not Required Category: Is this a No Repeater project? 2. Project Development Objective(s) The project development objective (PDO) is to provide income support to poor households and to lay the foundations for a basic safety net system in Burkina Faso. 3. Project Description The project will be implemented using Investment Project Financing (IPF) for a period of 5 years Page 1 of 8 starting in FY15. The project is expected to be financed by an IDA credit of US$50.00 million. Based on the existing evidence and on-going activities, the project will achieve the PDO by: i) designing and implementing a cash transfer program as one of the building blocks of an national Public Disclosure Copy safety net system, and ii) assist the country in establishing systems for coordinating and implementing safety net programs. The design of the proposed operation reflects the extensive analytical work and pilot experiences undertaken by the government, the Bank, and other development partners on safety nets in Burkina Faso (including the safety net assessment, poverty analysis, and the evaluations of pilot transfer programs). The key recommendations of the safety net assessment stated that safety nets in Burkina should directly support the consumption of the chronically poor households and ensure access to basic social services in order to promote human capital investment. Key conclusions of the impact evaluations note that transfer programs can increase food consumption both in quantity and quality, increase the poor’s use of health services and school attendance, and improve the nutritional status of children. Therefore, the priority principle of the system supported by the project is to ensure that poor households receive regular and predictable support along with complementary programs to ease demand side constraints preventing them from accessing to basic social services and improving their nutritional intake. The Bank and other partners are already engaged in the areas of safety nets and improving access to services by the poor in Burkina Faso. The Bank has engaged in dialogue with the government for more than 2 years and has established a strong relationship with the government and other partners on the safety net agenda. A parallel Youth Employment and Skills Development project (P130735) is currently implementing a public works program in urban centers such as Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso. The Bank is also supporting a Reproductive Health Project (P119917) which aims to assist the rural population and particularly poor women to access better reproductive health services. WFP’s voucher programs address other aspects of urban poverty, especially food poverty and provided support to around 30,000 households in these two cities during six months in 2010 and 2012. Public Disclosure Copy The project aims to start to bridge the gap between safety nets and the humanitarian response system and takes scalability and coordination issues at heart. The main target group of the project is chronically poor households eligible for cash transfer support as a cornerstone program of the overall safety net. However, the systems that will be developed under component 2 are meant to be usable for other safety nets, such as public works or voucher programs, and for programs subsidizing access to social services such as education and health so that government resources can be concentrated in the fight against food insecurity, exploit synergies, and maximize impact and efficiency. For instance, if urban areas were selected for the cash transfer program, they would take into account the location of operations of the public works program. The project will coordinate with the Reproductive Health Project which aims to assist the rural population to access better reproductive health services as well as WFP which aims to improve food insecurity and nutrition in some of the project areas. Project Components Component 1: Cash transfers and awareness programs for poor households (US$38.8 million). This component will support the development and implementation of a cash transfer program to serve as one of the cornerstones of Burkina Faso’s safety net. The cash transfers will support poor Page 2 of 8 households with young children by increasing their income for a period of 3 years. The payments will be made on a regular basis to allow beneficiaries to use the transfers to stabilize their food consumption and, indirectly, to enable mothers and main caregivers to ensure children’s proper Public Disclosure Copy feeding (e.g. by breastfeeding and accessing micronutrients as needed), and growth monitoring. This would contribute to improved nutrition in the household and decrease the need for negative coping mechanisms. The program will operate in the most disadvantaged areas of the country where chronic poverty and malnutrition are the highest. These regions include the Est, Nord, and Centre-Est as these are by far the poorest in the country. Targeting these areas is also consistent with the government’s efforts to concentrate resources in areas with high food insecurity as prioritized in the MDG Acceleration Framework. The focus will be on rural areas but may also include some peri-urban areas. The first level of targeting will be geographic and will select regions, districts/provinces and even communities based on recently available data on a combination of chronic poverty and prevalence of chronic malnutrition (stunting=height-for-age <-2 std). It will also take into account the availability of other complementary interventions such as those provided by the Reproductive Health Project and others related to food security, nutrition, and health in order to maximize the synergy between supply and demand. The targeted groups will include poor households with children under the age of 15 years and/or pregnant women. The second level of targeting will include a combination of simplified proxy means testing (PMT), categorical targeting, and community-based targeting in order to identify the poorest households with young children. The goal is to identify poor households whose children are at risk of being malnourished because they live in areas with high malnutrition prevalence. Community-based targeting has been tested in Burkina as a way of identifying the poorest in rural areas. While international evidence indicate that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life are the most important in terms of nutrition as any deficiencies incurred at this age are irreversible, the project will include households with children up to 15 years of age to encourage regular health check-ups, proper nutrition and school attendance for these children. In rural Burkina, almost all poor households have Public Disclosure Copy children under the age of 15 years old. The transfer level and structure are based on careful analysis of household level data and impact evaluations findings. In other African countries , a level equivalent to around 20 percent of monthly expenditures of poor households has proven sufficient to allow households to improve their consumption yet is low enough not to create any work disincentives. This level is equal to about FCFA 10,000 per household per month in Burkina (see Annex 6). Each selected enrolled household will be given one transfer payment per pay period. For households with less than five children under the age of 15 the monthly average transfer level will be FCFA 10,000 and for households with five children or more the transfer level will be around FCFA 13,000. Selected households will benefit from transfers for a total of 36 months. Transfers may be paid every three months subject to practicalities on the ground. Operationally, beneficiaries will receive cash through payment agencies, which will use a payment list provided by program management. The transfers will be provided to a female household representative once they present their beneficiary ID card. The payment system will be based on a centrally managed database, and payments will be made by fixed or mobile branches of the agencies selected by the operation (see Annex 2 for details). The component will also include accompanying measures in participating communities to assist Page 3 of 8 beneficiaries to improve household practices related to human development and in particular nutrition. The aim of these accompanying measures is to increase the probability of the households breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty, reduce the incidence of malnutrition, and improving Public Disclosure Copy human development goals related to MDG 1, 2, 4, and 5. As such, they will serve as ‘soft conditions’ or beneficiary co-responsibilities. The project will target all household members with a particular focus on pregnant women and children age 0-23 months, corresponding to the “window of opportunity”, which is a crucial time to ensure optimum physical growth and development of the individual child. The measures will include social and behavior change communication (SBCC) on the importance of nutrition for pregnant women and children 0-23 months, community-based promotion of cognitive development for children 24-59 months, education of children 5-15 years, and the economic capacity and empowerment for women. The accompanying measures will include demand-side measures but will not support nutrition direct interventions such as targeted feeding, nutritional recuperation, food distribution, or provision of micronutrients. For thi s, the project will coordinate with existing interventions at community level in order to link cash transfer beneficiaries with food and micronutrient supplementation and distribution services. As part of the SBCC, education, information, communication (IEC) services on topics such as good nutrition, breast-feeding, basic health care and sanitation (see Annex 2) will be provided in the communities. Beneficiaries will be urged to participate in these IEC sessions, as ‘soft conditions’ for receiving cash transfers although failure to attend will not result in withdrawal of the payments. Other SBCC activities that can be supported by the project include advocacy to local leaders and authorities, community mobilization and organization, counseling, home visits and communication via mass media (e.g. local radio). This component will finance cash transfers to beneficiary households as well as administrative costs for developing and implementing the program. The component will also finance implementation of the accompanying measures. Administrative costs such as the targeting, identification and registration of beneficiary housholds and the development and training of SBCC services are covered in component 2. Public Disclosure Copy Component 2: Laying the foundations for a basic national safety net system (US$6.6 million). This component will assist the country in designing and developing operational building blocks that can be used for coordinating safety net programs and increasing their effectiveness through a systemic approach. The objective is to contribute to the establishment of a long-term effective and sustainable (institutionally, politically and financially) system of safety nets anchored in the national social protection strategy. An important aspect of the proposed system will be the capacity to expand and adjust the safety net in response to shocks by: (i) increasing the value of the transfer given to current beneficiaries; and (ii) expanding the cash transfer program to additional beneficiaries, albeit for a shorter period of time than for the regular beneficiaries. Because developing, testing, implementing and updating systems takes time, this component will be implemented over the whole project period. This component will first support the development of the building blocks for the cash transfer program, as the core pillar of the Burkina safety net. The most important building blocks for coordinating and operating safety net programs are a) an effective targeting system for identifying potential beneficiary households; b) a registry of these households to be used by the different safety net programs; c) a Management Information System (MIS) linking the different interventions and the different levels of operations of the program implementers; d) a secure and efficient payment system Page 4 of 8 for making and validating payments; e) an M&E system to allow evidence based policy making and adjusting system functioning over time, which would include an audit; and f) a grievance redress mechanism including formal and social oversight mechanisms. This component will finance these Public Disclosure Copy systems for the cash transfer program and put them into operation when implementing the cash transfer program. Secondly, the targeting system and associated registry will be developed as a key foundation of the national safety net system. These two tools are key to identify the extreme poor in Burkina Faso and help focus the provision of social services to enhance their human capital. The project will also, to the extent possible, support the expansion of a selected number of other building blocks to be made applicable to other programs at the national level. Such systems may include the payment system or selected modules of the information system (MIS). The specific additional building blocks that may be supported will be determined during the first year of project implementation in consultation with the government and other partners. The project will use advocacy and policy discussions to facilitate the adoption of the selected systems by other programs and ministries. Thirdly, this component will include activities to strengthen the institutions needed for coordinating, implementing, and monitoring safety net programs. It will finance technical assistance, capacity building (such as training for government staff), operational manuals, and inputs and studies geared at developing and harmonizing the key building blocks of a national safety net system. Especially, the project will provide support to the newly established National Council for Social Protection, including its secretariat, and the project implementing unit in the Ministry of Social Action and National Solidarity (MASSN) for implementing and coordinating safety nets in the country. Finally, this component would support monitoring, process evaluation and a rigorous impact evaluation of the cash transfer program and its accompanying measures to learn whether the promising impacts of the pilots transfer hold up in a government-run scaled-up versions of these interventions in a low-income setting such as Burkina Faso. Public Disclosure Copy Component 3: Project management (US$4.6 million). This component will support the management of the overall project. It will finance project management and coordination activities related to the first two project components. The project implementation unit will be housed in the Ministry of Social Action and National Solidarity (MASSN). It will be team of recruited staff, paid by the project, including at a minimum a coordinator, a procurement specialist, and a financial management specialist. The component fill finance the salaries of project implementation staff, equipment, operating costs, training and special studies needed to ensure proper project management, implementation and reporting. The project may also finance support staff and consultants for implementation aspects such as social marketing, information systems, evaluation and feed-back systems, and capacity-strengthening of specific program implementers at the central and local levels. 4. Project location and salient physical characteristics relevant to the safeguard analysis (if known) This project is classified as Category C (Not Required) because no civil works or other project activities will be undertaken that have adverse environmental or social impacts. The project does not require any land acquisition leading to involuntary resettlement and/or restrictions of access to resources and livelihood. Page 5 of 8 The program will operate in the most disadvantages regions of the country - where chronic monetary poverty and chronic malnutrition (stunting) are the highest. These regions include the Est, Nord, and the Centre-Est. Two of the three regions (Est is the exception) also overlap with the World Bank Public Disclosure Copy Reproductive Health project. In order to ensure complementarity, the project will operate in the same districts that have been chosen in the health project’s second phase. While intraregional variance is small, these districts also have among the highest levels of poverty and malnutrition in their respective regions. In the Est, the project will operate in the three provinces with the highest prevalence of malnutrition according to Enquête Nationale de Nutrition (ENN). The selection of provinces/districts may be further refined and revised based on the poverty map currently under preparation, the ongoing 2014 household survey , or based on other participatory methods. Within provinces/districts villages will be randomly selected subject to population size, the number of poor households and accessibility. 5. Environmental and Social Safeguards Specialists Liba C. Strengerowski-Feldblyum (AFTN2) Paivi Koskinen-Lewis (AFTCS) 6. Safeguard Policies Triggered? Explanation (Optional) Environmental Assessment OP/ No BP 4.01 Natural Habitats OP/BP 4.04 No Forests OP/BP 4.36 No Pest Management OP 4.09 No Physical Cultural Resources OP/ No Public Disclosure Copy BP 4.11 Indigenous Peoples OP/BP 4.10 No Involuntary Resettlement OP/BP No 4.12 Safety of Dams OP/BP 4.37 No Projects on International No Waterways OP/BP 7.50 Projects in Disputed Areas OP/BP No 7.60 II. Key Safeguard Policy Issues and Their Management A. Summary of Key Safeguard Issues 1. Describe any safeguard issues and impacts associated with the proposed project. Identify and describe any potential large scale, significant and/or irreversible impacts: The project is expected to have a positive social impact by improving household income and behavior related to nutrition and preventative health practices in targeted communities. On the Page 6 of 8 basis of pre-determined criteria, the project will target the poorest and most vulnerable communities, specifically by providing cash transfers as well as by providing community awareness related to nutrition and other aspects of human capital and essential family practices for Public Disclosure Copy longer-term social benefits to adults and children in the area. As the household will be represented by a woman to receive the cash transfer positive impacts on the empowerment of women is also expected while both women and men will participate in the community events related to nutrition and family practices. 2. Describe any potential indirect and/or long term impacts due to anticipated future activities in the project area: The project is a Category C project, because no civil works will be undertaken and no adverse environmental or social impacts are expected. The project does not require any land acquisition leading to involuntary resettlement and/or restrictions of access to resources and livelihood. No safeguards policies are triggered as indicated in the table below. 3. Describe any project alternatives (if relevant) considered to help avoid or minimize adverse impacts. N/A 4. Describe measures taken by the borrower to address safeguard policy issues. Provide an assessment of borrower capacity to plan and implement the measures described. N/A 5. Identify the key stakeholders and describe the mechanisms for consultation and disclosure on safeguard policies, with an emphasis on potentially affected people. N/A B. Disclosure Requirements If the project triggers the Pest Management and/or Physical Cultural Resources policies, the respective issues are to be addressed and disclosed as part of the Environmental Assessment/ Audit/or EMP. Public Disclosure Copy If in-country disclosure of any of the above documents is not expected, please explain why: n/a C. Compliance Monitoring Indicators at the Corporate Level OP 7.60 - Projects in Disputed Areas Has the memo conveying all pertinent information on the Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] international aspects of the project, including the procedures to be followed, and the recommendations for dealing with the issue, been prepared Does the PAD/MOP include the standard disclaimer referred to Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] in the OP? The World Bank Policy on Disclosure of Information Have relevant safeguard policies documents been sent to the Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] World Bank's Infoshop? Have relevant documents been disclosed in-country in a public Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] place in a form and language that are understandable and accessible to project-affected groups and local NGOs? All Safeguard Policies Page 7 of 8 Have satisfactory calendar, budget and clear institutional Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] responsibilities been prepared for the implementation of Public Disclosure Copy measures related to safeguard policies? Have costs related to safeguard policy measures been included Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] in the project cost? Does the Monitoring and Evaluation system of the project Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] include the monitoring of safeguard impacts and measures related to safeguard policies? Have satisfactory implementation arrangements been agreed Yes [ ] No [ ] NA [ ] with the borrower and the same been adequately reflected in the project legal documents? III. APPROVALS Task Team Leader: Name: Azedine Ouerghi Approved By Sector Manager: Name: Stefano Paternostro (SM) Date: 27-Jan-2014 Public Disclosure Copy Page 8 of 8