Strengthening Systems for Social Protection and Civil Registration Project

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The development objective of the Strengthening Systems for Social Protection and Civil Registration Project for Nepal is to improve the coverage of social security allowances and civil registration, and the delivery of social security allowances. The project supports the DOCR’s Civil Registration and Social Security Strengthening Program consists of four components. The first component, improving coverage of civil registration (CR) and social security allowances (SSA) will support the expansion of coverage of CR and SSA by establishing a National Population Register of individuals and household/family folders. The register will be updated through regular CRs and targeted outreach and communications campaigns.The goal is to establish a CR system that will allow all individuals/residents easy access to CR, enable regular monitoring of registrations, generate timely vital statistics from a central database, and establish linkage with programs such as SSA. This component has two sub-components. (i) data collection to establish a population register; and (ii) communication and outreach campaign; The second component, modernizing social Security delivery systems suffers from ineffective control and accountability, low operational efficiency, and poor services. Specific sources of the weaknesses include the absence of a reliable, modern information technology (IT) system to record and manage beneficiary enrollments and payment transactions and the lack of sufficiently trained personnel to manage these processes at the local level. This component has two sub-components. (i) rolling out electronic payments; and (ii) improving accountability and citizen engagement in the social security delivery process; The third component, institutional strengthening is to achieve the project objectives of increased coverage of social security beneficiaries and CR and improved delivery of SSA, the institutional framework regulating these two functions as well as the organizational capacity of the implementing bodies need to be enhanced. This component is designed to support a range of crosscutting activities for sustainable institutionalization of the improvements supported under Components 1 and 2 by building the Government’s organizational and institutional capacities for managing CR and SSA functions at both the central and local levels. The activities supported under this component will be divided into the following subcomponents: (i) strengthening systems at the central level; (ii) strengthening systems at the local level; The fourth component,will support project implementation and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) by establishing and maintaining an effective Project Management Unit (PMU) and district-level project implementation units (DL-PIUs), building capacity of the project management staff, and financing specific project evaluation studies (for example, spot checks, base/mid/end-line surveys).