By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A $9.6m initiative to fight Bahamian poverty was undermined by the public sector’s “strict bureaucratic policies” that treated the effort as “business as usual”.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report on efforts to reform The Bahamas’ social safety net, which it helped to finance, revealed that the project ran into significant roadblocks that delayed the creation of new units critical to its implementation.

Besides the Project Execution Unit, the report discloses that the Cash Grant Unit - which was supposed to oversee the conditional cash transfer (CCT) regime linking state benefits payouts to improved educational achievement and better health outcomes - was hardest hit by the typical bureaucratic inertia within the government.

“The Project Execution Unit (PEU) and the Cash Grant Unit suffered significant challenges during implementation,” the IDB report, obtained by Tribune Business, reveals. “As reported in interviews with officers who operated in the units, there was an attempt by the management of the Ministry [of Social Services and Community Development] to operate the PEU as ‘business as usual’.

“These restrictions significantly impacted operations, as they were not based on standard project implementation processes and procedures but instead followed strict bureaucratic policies. This structure resulted in complex human resource policies, in which officers were required to fulfill all the requirements of those employed within the civil service. This codification resulted in lengthy staff recruitment to the PEU that resulted in delays in the organisation and administration of the Cash Grant Unit.”

Co-ordination between the PEU, the Department of Social Services and its ministry, and the ministries of health and education were identified as another obstacle, highlighting how rigid, inflexible government processes can act as a barrier towards efforts to improve the lives of the Bahamian people.

“The rigid reporting hierarchy significantly affected the agility of the project team to respond to implementation challenges,” the IDB report said. “The reporting structure led to protracted timelines for decisions and procurement transactions, as well as long review periods of consultant reports. All these delays, in turn, led to significant delays in the implementation of key project activities.

“These delays were the most significant, however, in the roll-out of the CCT pilot. Decisions related to all stages of the registration process were delayed primarily because of the lack of understanding of the processes, and the fact that decisions were not forthcoming....

“A total of four missions over the space of a year were used to determine the amount of the benefit to be paid by the CCT. Based on these mission reports, changing arrangements around the consolidation of the different benefit plans that would now be paid through the CCT required significant and multiple points of review before it was approved by the Cabinet in 2016. These discussions had started at the beginning of the project in 2012.”

The four-year wait to make key decisions is unlikely to surprise many observers of how the Government works. This part of the IDB report this exposes another element that undermined efforts to reduce Bahamian poverty.

Tribune Business previously revealed how the same report disclosed that poverty-stricken families and the Bahamian taxpayer received almost no value from the near-$5.4m investment already made in welfare reform when it was halted by the Minnis administration due to “the change in policy direction” that followed the May 2017 general election.

The project had been designed to “break the cycle” of “generational poverty” and welfare dependency by linking the payment of 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.