the pandemic was impossible and most safety net programing during the pandemic had to rely on information collected a few years ago. For example, in Egypt, the national cash transfer program that was expanded in response to the COVID-19 crisis targets households based on survey data that was collected up to four years ago.

The COVID-19 pandemic also emerged at a stage when social protection programming in some African countries was striving to be shock-responsive. These institutional arrangements in countries such as Kenya and Uganda were being oriented to rapidly scale up programs in certain geographical areas to respond to weather shocks but were not yet widespread in Africa and were poorly prepared to respond to a new type of shock (Beasley et al., 2021). Shock-responsiveness requires investments in data infrastructure and social registry which can aggregate administrative data and program beneficiary status across a variety of social protection programs, allowing for efficient coordination and identification of new beneficiaries without the necessity of collecting household data in the field. Only 12 countries in Africa were classified in 2018 as having a unified social registry operating at a medium to large scale. Even if some of these data may be available, the lack of digitalization and data sharing procedures may complicate their use for efficiently targeting safety net programs. In a case study of Kenya’s social protection expansion, it was noted that the value of social registry was compromised by incomplete data and bureaucratic delays with sharing access with the necessary stakeholders to facilitate the roll-out of new programs (Doyle and <mark>Ikutwa,</mark> 2021).

# **_Targeting based on existing listings and associated limitations_**

Even where the use of existing listings for scaling worked most smoothly, basing short-term aid responses for COVID-19 on eligibility for long-term existing programs or social registries risks excluding certain groups, such as migrants and the undocumented. Migrant-receiving countries in southern Africa such as Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa did not have any formal program during the COVID-19 lockdowns to support migrant workers who suddenly found themselves unemployed and cut-off from their home country (Dafuleya, 2020). New program enrollment often required a national ID or mobile phone in one’s own name, which disadvantages women and ethnic minorities (Doyle and <mark>Ikutwa,</mark> 2021).

Finally, in general, the challenge for targeting using existing lists was that the most severely affected households in the COVID-19 crisis were urban households while safety nets in Africa have traditionally focused on rural areas (Beegle et al., 2018). The pandemic has particularly affected urban dwellers dependent on the informal sector of the economy (e.g., Zeufack et al., 2021). The informal sector in Africa comprises 76.8% of non-agricultural employment, with a disproportional share of migrants and women (Guven et al., 2021). These households are not poor enough to be included in social assistance programs targeting the poorest and because of the informal nature of their employment they are less likely 25