The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Poverty-stricken families and the Bahamian taxpayer have received almost no value from a near-$5.4m investment in welfare reform that was halted by the Minnis administration.

An Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report on efforts to reform The Bahamas' social safety net, which it helped to finance, reveals that the already-launched initiative was "cancelled after the change in policy direction" that followed the May 2017 general election.

The document, which has been obtained by Tribune Business, reveals that $5.374m in IDB financing had been spent by the time the project was stopped. This now represents monies taxpayers will have to repay despite not gaining the intended benefits from them.

Frankie Campbell, minister of social services and urban development, could not be reached for comment yesterday despite text messages and voice mails being left. However, the Minnis administration last year blasted the welfare reform initiative for having "self-destructed and suffered irreparable defects as a result of poor management, low performance outputs and failure to meet deliverables".

It added that the IDB itself had recommended closing the project by its "fixed expiration date" of August 2017 due to the "limited results" and problems associated with its execution. Yet none of this is mentioned by the IDB's "project completion report" which, while acknowledging implementation challenges, blamed its closure on policy decisions taken by the Minnis administration.

Melanie Griffin, the former social services minister who oversaw the project's development, yesterday told Tribune Business that the IDB report exposed "a total loss for this country" when it came to combating "generational poverty" and welfare dependency.

She added that the project had been designed to "break that cycle" by linking the payment of welfare benefits to specific education and health goals. Known as a conditional cash transfer (CCT), which would have consolidated the Government's benefits regime, the initiative aimed to "change behaviour" among the children of poor families by promoting schooling and healthy living.

Benefits recipients would have been required to ensure their children maintained a 90 percent school attendance record at both primary and secondary level, and keep a grade point average (GPA) of 2.0 or more. Dropping below this level would have triggered a 90 percent minimum attendance threshold at tutoring classes.

On the health front, beneficiaries and their families would have been required to attend the likes of routine prenatal classes, "well child care" visits, parent craft classes and healthy weight clinics in a bid to combat childhood obesity and the high level of non-communicable diseases that flow from it.

Mrs Griffin, arguing that the IDB report vindicated her criticisms of the Minnis administration, said it was another example of how five-yearly changes in government are undermining initiatives that benefit the Bahamian people.

Adding that the fight against poverty was non-political, the former Cabinet Minister said the Christie administration would have sought an extension of the August 2017 deadline from the IDB had it been returned to office.

"It was a full onslaught against poverty," Mrs Griffin told Tribune Business. "It was not just doling out assistance. It was meant to take us beyond that. It was meant to take families out of poverty by building health, education and making them better able to compete in the job market.

"For me and this country it was a total loss for this programme to be stopped. We already had in place the IT platform; it was just about complete. Everything was in place. The IT system was not just in New Providence; we had built the capacity and started to send computers to Grand Bahama. I myself sat in training on these computers.

"I'm very passionate about this. I got involved with this personally to push things, drive things...... It just goes to show what happens when you have changes of government, and you do not have the inclination to move forward with what the previous administration left in place," she continued.

"All they [the Minnis administration] had to do was build on it. The IDB is not political, and we had already had training sessions on it. This was devastating for the social workers, who were looking forward to helping clients better and weaning them off poverty."

The decision to halt the Social Safety Net Reform initiative was taken under Mr Campbell's ministerial predecessor, Lanesha Rolle, who is now minister of youth, sports and culture. A previous IDB report, revealed by Tribune Business last year, was also highly critical of the effort in finding that it achieved "none of the planned outcomes" with just 27 percent of the targeted 12,000 Bahamian households receiving cash grants.

However, the more-detailed "project completion report" provides a different take, arguing that the minimal achievements had more to do with the project being halted in mid-stream while also identifying the typical bureaucratic weaknesses in the Bahamian government.

"The project was cancelled after the change in policy direction based on the change in the political administration after the elections in May 2017," the IDB report said. "Using social safety nets as a means of affecting these outcomes is no longer seen as a viable option for affecting these indicators.

"After the change in government, the programme was assessed and found not to be in line with the current policy direction, which is why most of the outcomes, which depended on the government delivering transfers under the new rule, were not achieved."

Some $9.6m worth of funding had initially been dedicated to alleviating poverty and welfare dependency, with $7.5m to come from the IDB and the balance from the Government. While the project was halted before the final $4.386m was disbursed, some $5.374 had already been used.

"What we had under the old system was a grandmother on food assistance, her daughter on food assistance, and her daughter's daughter on food assistance," Mrs Griffin said yesterday. "It was generational, and for us to break that generational cycle was very important and to make these people better able to fend for themselves.

"Did the programme have some setbacks, some challenges? Of course it did. It was a first for us. This was totally new for us. In fact, the programme in The Bahamas was going further than many in other countries. We looked at what had been done in other countries, and changed them to suit the situation in The Bahamas with all its islands. It was tailor-made for The Bahamas."

Mrs Griffin said the switch from paper food coupons to pre-paid cards was also designed to combat widespread fraud involving the former that has been identified in previous Auditor-General's reports.

"One of the important conclusions from the report was that the targeting mechanism was well designed and would have been adequate to target the poor," the IDB project completion report said, noting that some funding was used to help poor households recover from Hurricane Matthew in October 2016.