Publication: Evaluating the Impact of Egyptian Social Fund for Development Programs
Date
2009-07-01
ISSN
Published
2009-07-01
Author(s)
Abstract
The Egyptian Social Fund for Development
was established in 1991 with a mandate to reduce poverty.
Since its inception, it has disbursed about $2.5 billion, of
which nearly two-fifths was devoted to supporting
microcredit and financing community development and
infrastructure. This paper investigates the size of the
impact of the Fund s interventions, whether the benefits
have been commensurate with the costs, and whether the
programs have been targeted successfully to the poor. The
core of the impact evaluation applies propensity-score
matching to data from the 2004/2005 national Household
Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey. The authors find
that Egypt s Social Fund for Development programs have had
clear and measurable effects, in the expected direction, for
all of the programs considered: educational interventions
have reduced illiteracy, health and potable water programs
have lowered household spending on health, sanitation
interventions have cut household spending on sanitation and
lowered poverty, and road projects have reduced household
transportation costs by 20 percent. Microcredit is
associated with higher household expenditures in
metropolitan areas and urban Upper Egypt, but not elsewhere.
The Social Fund for Development s road projects generate
benefits that, by some estimates, exceed the costs, as do
health and potable water interventions; this is less evident
for interventions in education and sanitation. The Fund
argues that its mission is primarily social, and so should
not be judged using a cost-benefit analysis. The Fund
support for microcredit is strongly pro-poor; the other
programs analyzed have a more modest pro-poor orientation.
Citation
“Abou-Ali, Hala; El-Azony, Hesham; El-Laithy, Heba; Haughton, Jonathan; Khandker, Shahidur R.. 2009. Evaluating the Impact of Egyptian Social Fund for Development Programs. Impact Evaluation series ; no. IE 31 Policy
Research working paper ; no. WPS 4993. © http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/4184 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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