Dr Seuss was the nom de plume of Theodor Seuss
Geisel, who wrote (and himself illustrated) a series of excellent children’s
books during the 1940s and 1950s. The best know are probably The Cat in the
Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Green Eggs and Ham.
In total his children’s books have sold over 600 million copies.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure to read Dr
Seuss’s books, I strongly recommend them. Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose,
published in 1948, tells the story of a moose, who is asked for a lift by a
Bingle bug:
The bug called out,
“Hey! It’s such a long road
And it’s such a hot day,
Would you mind if I rode
On your horns for a way?”
Thidwick kindly allows the Bingle bug to ride in his
antlers. And the bug is soon joined by a Tree-spider, and then a Zinn-a-zu bird,
who pulls out 204 of Thidwick’s hairs to make a nest…where he is immediately
joined by his new wife and her uncle, a woodpecker who “started in drilling”. A
family of squirrels moves in to the four holes the woodpecker has drilled in
Thidwick’s antlers; then a bobcat and a turtle, and:
They asked in a fox, who jumped in from the trees,
They asked in some mice and they asked in some fleas
They asked a big bear in and then, if you please
Came a swarm of three hundred and
sixty-two bees
By now the rest of the moose-herd has abandoned Thidwick, to
winter on the other side of the lake, where “moose-moss” is plentiful but whither
Thidwick cannot swim because of the unwanted guests on his antlers. At the dénouement,
he finds himself prey to a group of hunters from the Harvard Club:
“Get that moose!
Get that moose!”
Thidwick heard a voice call
“Fire again and again,
And shoot straight, one and all!
We must get his head
For the Harvard Club wall!”
This sorry situation exactly parallels what has happened
with PSNP in Ethiopia. It was conceived in 2004 as a seasonal workfare
programme for the most food insecure households, paying them a small wage in
return for their labour over six months of the lean season. It has become
something of a flagship over the years, expanding to reach over ten million
Ethiopians in a bad year. It is an international showcase of how to convert
annual “emergency” response into a comprehensive multi-annual programme of
support to chronically vulnerable households.
However, because it is the only significant social
assistance intervention in Ethiopia, PSNP has become a victim of its own
success. The seed was sown from the very outset, in 2005, when the donors
insisted that it should include a component of direct support for those poor households
that had no labour capacity. With the benefit of hindsight, this was PSNP’s
Bingle bug: it seemed principled and sensible at the time, but it opened the
door for more and more to be loaded on to PSNP. Slowly, over its four phases
since 2005, PSNP has taken on more and more diverse encumbrances, just like
Thidwick. First, the direct support component has expanded and diversified, to
include support to the elderly, those with disabilities, pregnant and lactating
women, and the mothers of acutely malnourished children. Second, it now finds
itself overburdened with health insurance, gender and social development, nutrition,
WaSH, child protection and livelihoods. Phase 5, currently being designed, is
intended additionally to reduce child marriage, further enhance nutrition
outcomes during the first 1000 days, support early childhood development and ensure
school attendance! It is turning into a disability grant, an old age pension,
an infant grant, a school bursary and a programme to counter acute
malnutrition. Yet it is still at heart a seasonal public works programme whose
objective is to improve the food security of working age adults.
There are clearly a number of fundamental incompatibilities,
across a range of dimensions, between this original objective and the type of
life-course assistance that is now dragging it down. PSNP’s targeting is still
based on food insecure households, not vulnerable individuals. Its work
requirement is mandatory for those households, but is totally incompatible –
even counter-productive – in the case of the other life-course stages. It
operates in only a subset of woredas (or districts) that had been most in need
of earlier emergency response, whereas life-course vulnerabilities exist in all
woredas nationwide. Its six-month duration is wholly inappropriate to those life-course
groups requiring full-time support. Its objectives, of providing employment and
creating community assets, are equally far removed from those of providing
dignity and inclusion for the elderly and those with disabilities, or of providing
better nutrition to mothers and infants. And its exit strategy of graduation
(however over-optimistic this has proved to be) is very different from the exit
strategy of life-course programmes, such as age limits or death. Finally, one
of PSNP’s notable features, its scalability and ability to increase coverage in
response to unpredictable annual needs, is divorced from the predictable and more
inclusive approach needed for life-course social assistance.
Like Thidwick, PSNP is facing an existential crisis. What
can be done? Fortunately, Thidwick provides an answer. Faced with the gang of
Harvard hunters, and weighed down by his unwanted guests, Thidwick does what
all moose do every year:
Finished?
Not Thidwick!
DECIDEDLY NOT!
It’s true he was in a most terrible spot,
But NOW he remembered a thing he’d forgot!
A wonderful something that happens each year
To the horns of each moose and the horns of each deer.
Today was the day,
Thidwick happened to know,
That OLD horns come off so
that NEW ones can grow!
Thidwick sheds his antlers and all their unwelcome
freeloaders. That is what PSNP needs to do now. It needs to be refocussed on
what it was originally designed to do: to provide a seasonal (and
shock-responsive) safety net for the working age poor with labour capacity. Its
operations could be trimmed back to the essentials, and the focus should be on
making it work well. And alongside PSNP, Ethiopia now needs to start to
implement a broader range of social assistance interventions, addressing
individual vulnerabilities across the rest of the life-course: for those with
disabilities, for the elderly, for pregnant and lactating women, for street
children, and so on. These programmes can piggy-back on the operational systems
that have been developed for PSNP, and can leverage the linkages that PSNP has
forged, but they can then pursue their own appropriate objectives, and be
coordinated by the Ministry of Labour & Social Affairs rather than the
Ministry of Agriculture (as PSNP is now).
There is already an evident recognition of the need for such
genuine unconditional social protection across the life-course. The evolution
and considerable expansion of what is now called permanent direct
support (for the elderly and people with disabilities), and the more recent
addition of temporary direct support (for pregnant and lactating women
and mothers of malnourished children) are a clear demonstration. And Ethiopia
now has a National Social Protection Policy and Strategy, both of which adopt a
life-course lens: “Protection from deprivation is particularly critical at key
stages in the life cycle, notably during pregnancy, early childhood, and
adolescence. At times, individuals need protection because they are unable to
work and generate income due to old age and/or disability”. Both documents also
identify the vulnerable groups in Ethiopia exclusively in terms of individual
vulnerabilities, not in terms of household food insecurity. Furthermore, responsibility
for coordination of life-course social assistance is explicitly allocated to
the Ministry of Labour & Social Affairs.
Will PSNP be able, like Thidwick, to jettison its extraneous
baggage and return to the intervention for the working age poor that it was always
meant to be, thereby leaving the space for Ethiopia to develop a comprehensive life-course
social assistance package around it? Ironically, this should represent a
win:win option: the workfare purists should welcome a return to simple
labour-based transfers, while the welfare purists should be delighted to drop
the labour requirement and move towards unconditional social assistance for vulnerable
individuals. Unfortunately, it is by no means certain this will happen. PSNP
has acquired its own momentum: it is like a hugely cumbersome ocean liner,
steered by the Government and eleven different donors, each with its own agenda
and priorities. Even deviating its course slightly is a major task: turning it
around is near impossible. Thidwick himself had faced the same problem when he
wanted to swim across the lake:
“We’re fair,” said the bug.
“We’ll decide this by vote.
All those in favor of going, say ‘AYE,’
All those in favor of staying say ‘NAY’.”
“AYE!” shouted Thidwick, but when he was done…
“NAY!” they all yelled.
He lost ’leven to one.
At a time when most countries are trying hard to make their
social protection shock-responsive, Ethiopia is facing the challenge of making
its shock response socially-protective. To succeed, it will need a more radical
approach than just a fifth phase of PSNP. It needs to realise the life-course
aspirations enshrined in its National Social Protection Strategy. To achieve
this, it should separate PSNP’s permanent direct support into a disability and
old age pension. It should transition its temporary direct support into an
inclusive first 1000-day grant. And it needs to retain PSNP as a scalable component
of the Strategy targeted at the working age poor. Together with free primary
and secondary education and with the Community-Based Health Initiative, this
would provide a social protection floor of comprehensive coverage through the life-course.
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