RW-First Community Living Standards Grant

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The First Community Living Standards Grant (CLSG-l), the first of a programmatic series of three, is a development policy operation that will support this country assistance strategy (CAS) objective. Its objective is to support Government of Rwanda (GoR's) social protection and health policy reforms designed to reduce extreme poverty, initially in 30 pilot sectors, and to expand access to high-impact health, nutrition and population interventions at the community level. Given GoR's commitment to achieving quick results in the domain of poverty reduction, even in the midst of the ongoing global economic financial crisis, the urgency of social protection policy and institutional reforms cannot be over-emphasized. The policy actions to be supported focus on ensuring that GoR's policy reforms follow international good practice in the domain of social protection by adopting a non-distortionary wage policy, a policy to pay workers directly without intermediaries, a voluntary savings policy, a policy of determining direct support benefits to poor families with no adult labor that is based on the household as a unit, a policy to make the eligibility determination process clear and transparent, and health policies to expand poor households' access at the community level to high-impact health, nutrition and population interventions using performance-based financing mechanisms.