This was on the occasion of the signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Understanding, on June 06, 2023, in the meeting room of the INS, between the Director General of the INS and the National Coordinator of the said project.
The ceremony was brief, but the stakes were high. The project will enable 22,000 households in the Far North, North, Adamawa, East, Yaoundé and Douala to benefit from cash transfers of around 20,000 CFA francs every two months for 24 months. Lessons learned from previous funding cycles have led the Government and its involved partners to expand the scope of assistance to the most disadvantaged clusters of the population. Thus, in addition to direct and regular cash transfers to households, the PFS-IEA intends to provide support to 65,000 young workers aged 18 to 35 in the informal sector who are “subsistence entrepreneurs” (i.e. working on their own account due to a lack of other opportunities or skills) in urban areas. It will also provide support to 2,000 young entrepreneurs aged 18 to 35 with promising business projects in targeted productive sectors that are priorities for the government.
The Project has 5 components, namely:
Component 1: Adaptive social safety nets. This Component aims to provide household income support with a view to strengthening and protecting human capital and increasing resilience to conflict-related and climate-related shocks. The Component will provide poor and vulnerable households, including internally displaced persons and host communities, with support for consumption smoothing and employment, while simultaneously encouraging investments in human capital development and productive activities.
This first component includes three sub-components, namely: Regular Cash Transfers, Emergency Cash Transfers, and Labour-Intensive Public Works Programme.
Component 2: Youth Economic Inclusion and Entrepreneurship. This Component aims to promote the economic inclusion of young people, including internally displaced persons, and to prevent a potential increase in social tensions and conflicts. The Component will target youth (aged 18-35) in urban areas, with a focus on vulnerable youth in the informal sector. First, by improving the productivity of self-employment activities, the Component aims to support sustainable market-based employment and offer a short-term solution to poor and vulnerable urban youth.
Component 3: Digital delivery systems responsive to shocks. This Component will improve performance and responsiveness to shocks to the social protection sector in Cameroon by developing resilient and flexible delivery systems.
Component 4: Support for the management and coordination of the project. This Component will fund the provision of technical, advisory and other material support for the implementation of the project. Specifically, it will support key project management functions and capacity building of government staff and other actors for the coordination, design and implementation of social safety nets and economic inclusion interventions.
Component 5: Emergency Response Component (ECRC). This is a zero-dollar interim component, intended to allow for a rapid reallocation of loan proceeds from other components of the project in the event of an emergency.
As part of the implementation of these components, the role of the INS is to conduct the survey on living conditions for the choice of households benefiting from Social Transfers (CVTS) in the beneficiary communes of Cycle 6 of the ordinary cash transfer program. The CVTS survey aims to:
– Carry out the mapping of the villages/neighbourhoods from which the 22,000 beneficiary households of Cycle 6 of the TMO will come;
– Count and list all households in the beneficiary villages/neighbourhoods to allow the communities to choose potential beneficiary households;
– collect the data necessary for their classification from potential beneficiary households with a view to choosing beneficiary households.
The CVTS survey itself will consist of collecting data from all potential beneficiary households targeted by communities in the beneficiary villages/neighborhoods. These data relate to: (i) general information, (ii) the list of household members, (iii) the characteristics of the head and other household members, (iv) housing conditions and (v) household assets. The CVTS survey provides a good quality database on potential beneficiary households, which will be integrated and saved in the Project’s Management Information System (MIS), in order to allow the calculation of household scores and to classify them from the poorest to the least poor for the choice of beneficiaries.