Evaluating the Cost-Effectiveness of Conditional Targeted Social Assistance Program in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Kazakhstan’s Conditional Targeted Social Assistance (CTSA) program is a large-scale workfare program that targets poor people, who are able to work. This study evaluates the cost-effectiveness of the CTSA program in delivering 1 tenge of benefits to the poor. For this purpose, the framework for rapid appraisal of workfare programs has been modified to employ qualitative methods to estimate components of the cost-effectiveness ratio (CER). The study results suggest that under the CTSA it takes from 6.17 to 9.26 tenge to increase the current earnings of the poor program participants, which is significantly more compared to similar workfare schemes in other countries. Benefit ‘leakage’, low share of benefits received by the poor and problems with program design have negatively affected the cost-effectiveness ratio. Better targeting, stronger linkage to other interventions and introduction of ‘graduation’ mechanism might improve the performance of the CTSA program in a long run.