World Bank approves $374m project providing cash assistance to 270,000 households in Jordan

AMMAN — The World Bank (WB) Group’s Board of Executive Directors on Thursday approved a $374 million project to provide cash support to 270,000 underprivileged and vulnerable households in Jordan, including those who have recently lost their source of income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Emergency Cash Transfer COVID-19 Response Project is co-financed with the UK Department for International Development (DFID), according to a WB statement made available to The Jordan Times

The COVID-19 pandemic has "substantially weakened" Jordan’s near-term growth prospects and Jordanian households “are feeling the impact of this economic shock”, mainly through job losses and reduced earnings, the statement said. 

Informal workers are being particularly impacted and have "no access" to formal social protection schemes. These workers are also disproportionally concentrated in poor and near-poor households and as a result, near-poor households are being pushed into poverty and underprivileged families are being pushed further below the poverty line.

“In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the World Bank mobilised resources to help Jordan face the health impacts of the pandemic,” World Bank Mashreq Regional Director Saroj Kumar Jha said in the statement. 

“This new project aims to help Jordan address the social and economic repercussions of the crisis as a result of shrinking job markets, wage cuts and reduced income levels. Providing emergency cash transfers to poor and vulnerable households, including female-headed households, is key to enabling them to weather the crisis and preserve resilience and social stability,” he said. 

According to Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Wissam Rabadi, part of the Jordanian government's response to the economic threat that the pandemic poses to the Kingdom's formal-sector workforce has included mandating firms to retain their workers, setting restrictions on wage cuts and providing liquidity and exemptions to businesses.

“The government has also adopted an ambitious national programme to protect poor and vulnerable households affected by the COVID-19 crisis through the National Aid Fund [NAF], Jordan’s leading agency for cash transfers to the poor,” he added in the statement.

The World Bank’s Emergency Cash Transfer COVID-19 Response Project will support this national programme by providing cash transfers over a period of six months to 190,000 vulnerable households not currently benefiting from the NAF. 

The project will also support the "Takaful" cash transfer programme to cover 55,000 poor households in 2020 and 85,000 in 2021, in addition to providing a six-month benefit top-up for current beneficiary households to reach the same benefit levels set for the emergency cash transfers, according to the statement. 

The emergency cash transfers will use the delivery platform built for Takaful: A digitised cash transfer programme for the underprivileged launched in May 2019 alongside Jordan’s National Social Protection Strategy for 2019-2025, the statement said, noting that emergency cash transfer beneficiaries are selected from the Takaful database, which provides up-to-date and verified socio-economic data for over one million households using the data exchange platform of the National Unified Registry.

“The Takaful platform introduced significant improvements in cash transfer delivery systems in Jordan, including online registration, automatic data verification, improved targetting methodology, beneficiary enrolment sessions to open digital accounts, payments through basic bank accounts or e-wallets and a robust grievance and redress mechanism,” said Khalid Moheyddeen, World Bank social protection specialist and team leader. 

“The Takaful platform is the basis for the future expansion of the National Unified Registry to be the single gateway for all Jordanians seeking social assistance,” he said.