Summary
Governments worldwide are turning to automation to help them deliver essential public services, such as food, housing, and cash assistance. But some forms of automation are excluding people from services and singling them out for investigation based on errors, discriminatory criteria, or stereotypes about poverty. Despite these harms, the allure of tech-based solutions to complex social problems is proving hard to resist.
The World Bank is one of the biggest development actors driving this trend, particularly in the Global South, placing big bets on data-intensive technologies to help governments deliver services. This includes major cash transfer programs that give certain individuals or families financial support. In the Middle East and North Africa alone, eight of ten borrowing countries have received Bank loans to upgrade these programs.
The Bank has long promoted cash transfer programs that select beneficiaries by trying to estimate their income and welfare. This approach, known as poverty targeting, has attracted intense criticism for undermining people’s social security rights, particularly in the wake of the economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Poverty targeted programs are prone to error, mismanagement, and corruption, and routinely fail to reach many of the people they aim to cover. While the Bank has acknowledged these problems, it is financing a range of technologies it claims will make poverty targeting more accurate, reliable, and efficient.
This report documents the human rights impact of one such Bank-financed program in Jordan, known as the Unified Cash Transfer Program, but commonly referred to by its original name, Takaful. After screening out families that do not meet basic eligibility criteria, Takaful uses an algorithm to identify which of those remaining should receive cash transfers by ranking their level of economic vulnerability. Drawing on interviews with applicants and beneficiaries, government officials, community activists, and an analysis of World Bank documents, Human Rights Watch found that this algorithm is leading to cash transfer decisions that deprive people of their rights to social security. The problem is not merely that the algorithm relies on inaccurate and unreliable data about people’s finances. Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking that pits one household against another, fueling social tension and perceptions of unfairness.
The harms of Takaful’s targeting algorithm highlight the need for cash transfer programs based on the principles of universal social protection – providing all people with support during periods of their lives when their economic and social rights are particularly at risk, such as when they are children, face disability, become unemployed, or reach old age, and regardless of their income or wealth. On paper, the Bank has endorsed this approach as the “cornerstone of inclusive social policy.” But it continues to fund poverty targeted programs in dozens of countries, despite the wealth of policy options available to finance their transition to universal schemes.
This gap between rhetoric and practice has devastating effects on people’s rights to social security and related rights to food, health, housing, and an adequate standard of living. Although Takaful has extended regular cash assistance to 120,000 households in 2022, this is only a small fraction of the households in Jordan living under the official poverty line, which itself is an inadequate measure of the number of people unable to realize their economic, social, and cultural rights in the face of high inflation and unemployment.