to benefit from formal social insurance, which on average covers only 10.9% of the working population in Africa (Guven et al., 2021). Some social protection expansions in North and West Africa attempted to target informal workers, including in Benin, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Madagascar, and Mauritius. However, this was difficult in practice as there was less potential to build on existing databases.

# **_Alternative targeting approaches_**

In addition to targeted cash transfers, other forms of social protection responses especially in Central and West Africa included provision of subsidies or waiver for utility payments. Angola, Benin, Cabo Verde, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guniea, Guyana, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Namibia, Togo, and Zambia all implemented some version of utility payment relief (Gentillini et al., 2020). While in theory, this type of social protection response allows targeting based on past usage levels, many countries skipped this step and simply reduced payments or implemented moratoriums on cutting off utilities across the board. As wealthier households consume more utilities, this even-handed approach is likely to end up disproportionately benefitting the better-off. Even when the utility subsidy was targeted based on past usage levels, in practice, utility subsidies may still be regressive. A household level panel survey in Accra, Ghana, showed limited impact of the utility subsidy on protecting food security or increasing consumption (Berkower, 2022). A major contributor to this lack of impact was that for poor households, it is common to share a meter for multiple households or for the landlord’s name to be on the electric bill, so the program ended up being poorly targeted.

A new targeting approach pioneered in Togo used mobile phone usage patterns to identify poor households. While this approach does not reach the level of targeting effectiveness of the ideal unified social registry approach, it did compare favorably to broad-based geographical targeting (Aiken et al. 2022).

# **5.2 Evidence on targeting performance during the pandemic**

Targeting analysis of the COVID-19 social protection response is already available for some selected countries in spite of the constraints on collecting household level data and subject to the caveats noted above that the ideal response would not necessarily target the household which were poorest pre-COVID. Labor market monitoring surveys in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt in February 2021 show that social protection targeting was fairly progressive in Egypt with the poorest (pre-COVID) income quartile having almost double the average probability of receiving assistance. On the other hand, in Tunisia, the poorest quartile only had 1.5 times the average probability of receiving assistance and in Morocco, the poorest quartile was only slightly more likely to receive assistance than average. Beyond income quintiles, in Egypt and Morocco, informal workers were two to four times more likely to have lost their work during the pandemic than formal sector workers. Egypt’s social protection response specifically targeted informal workers, and 26