A robust targeting and monitoring system is essential to prioritizing the poor and vulnerable in emergency assistance and disaster risk reduction. While the government’s National Resilience Fund monitoring system ensured that social relief reached the poor and the vulnerable and other affected groups as envisaged, the preparation of reports took almost 1 month on average. The COVID-19 experience indicates that pandemics affect women and women differently because of gender inequalities caused by socioeconomic conditions and societal gender norms, which put women and girls at a disadvantage. The gender targets for the reform areas in this program ensured that women who were severally affected by the pandemic received adequate support from the state. Hence, there is a need to ensure gender targets for similar programs in the future. Furthermore, a more robust targeting and monitoring framework, with capability to generate disaggregated data in real time, could have provided useful evidence of the effectiveness of various measures as well as guidance for improvements.
COVID-19 Active Response and Expenditure Support Program COVID-19 Active Response and Expenditure Support Program