COVID-19 Active Response and Expenditure Support Program

The ambitiousness of goals should be balanced with the availability of data and capacity to quickly augment more granular data collection. Data disaggregated by sex and age of end-recipients are often not available at the time of project preparation and this was the case with this program. Even after effectiveness and during implementation, only limited new data were prepared by the government. Systems were lacking to collect such data. The program did identify this gap, and in response the government agreed to expand availability and collection across fiscal, tax, social, and health areas. The general agreement was for systematic collection of sex-disaggregated data of beneficiaries, including but not limited to (i) disaggregation by sex and age of end-recipients; and (ii) composition of households, including male versus female heads and number of dependents. The challenges evident in the collection of additional Gender, age, and recipient data can be partially explained by their unavailability on a level of granularity required insomuch as the goals were set quite ambitiously. As crisis conditions were evident and critical health and social needs were present and needing to be addressed rapidly, it was not possible to quickly adapt systems to be capable of collecting more detailed data before implementing reforms and assistance programs.