Impact evaluation report: Egypt’s Takaful Cash Transfer Program: Second round report

Book excerpt: Egypt introduced the Takaful and Karama Program (TKP), a pair of targeted cash transfer schemes in March 2015. Takaful and Karama was designed as a conditional cash transfer program providing income support targeted to the poor and most vulnerable; namely poor families with children (under 18 years of age), poor elderly (aged 65 years and above) and persons with severe disability. Originally implemented as an unconditional cash transfer, the program is now a conditional cash transfer program, but the conditionalities have yet to be monitored. Starting July 2017, households received EGP60 for each child under 6 years old, EGP80 for each child in primary education, EGP100 for children in preparatory education, and EGP140 for secondary education. As of June 2017, 90% of TKP beneficiaries were women. In 2018, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) completed the first round of impact evaluation of TKP, based on household survey data collected after the first 15 months of the program. The evaluation found that TKP substantially improved wellbeing for poor households, increasing household consumption per adult equivalent by 8.4 percent. and reducing the probability that a beneficiary household is poor (< USD1.90 per capita per day) by 11.4 percentage points, which is comparable to several of the well-known, large-scale programs in Latin America where consumption impacts are on the order of 7-8 percent.