beneficiaries from the legacy database would be available for referral under the medium and low (70 and 50 percent) referral confidence.

This will result in the smallest number of referrals – allowing time for MoLSA budgets and systems to absorb new beneficiaries over time – but also those households receiving humanitarian assistance who would be most likely to be eligible under MoLSA eligibility criteria. As the neediest cases are absorbed by the national system, the targeting threshold can be relaxed to 25, 30, or 35 percent of the poorest population. The percentage of cases from the humanitarian database that will be referred to MoLSA for screening under the relaxed targeting thresholds are shown in Annex Table A 1. In general, higher the targeting threshold and lower the referral confidence, the more cases will be referred.

_Table 7: Percentage of existing humanitarian database likely to be eligible for MoLSA program at different degrees of confidence and smaller program size_

|Scenario|Program Size|Referral Confidence|Percentage of Households|
|---|---|---|---|
|High confidence,<br>medium-smallprogram|Poorest 18 percent<br>nationally|90 percent|24.3 percent|
|Medium confidence,<br>medium-smallprogram|Poorest 18 percent<br>nationally|70 percent|44.2 percent|
|Low confidence, medium-<br>smallprogram|Poorest 18 percent<br>nationally|50 percent|54.1 percent|
|_Data Source_: CLCI Legacy D|atabase.|||

These results are important for two reasons. First, they suggest a large proportion of the humanitarian database could be potentially referred for MoLSA social protection programs. Second, a clear sequencing of smaller numbers with a high degree of likelihood to qualify could be referred first, with larger numbers being referred later when budgets expand.

# 4.2 Who Are the Likely Eligible? A Profile

This sub-section profiles households from the CLCI legacy database that would be deemed eligible by the PPMT. The profile focuses on eligible households under the targeting of the bottom 18 percent nationally – the national poverty rate in 2017/18 before the adjustment for SWIFT non-coverage and likeliest coverage criteria. In particular, we analyze households that are eligible at 90 percent of confidence level, which we referred to as households with “High Likelihood of Eligibility (HLE)”. Analysis at 70 percent confidence, referred to as “Moderate Likelihood of Eligibility (MLE)” is discussed in Annex B. As reported in Table 7, households under HLE account for 24.3 percent of the legacy database, while 42.3 percent are eligible under the MLE scenario. Annex B also provides the profile of the households that are deemed ineligible even under the largest program and least confidence scenario explored in the paper i.e. poorest 35 percent nationally at 50 percent confidence level for comparison.

Among the households with the highest likelihood of cross-model eligibility (90 percent confidence level; hereafter referred to as the HLE sample), a third are concentrated in Mosul, followed by other large urban centers such as Tikrit and Ramadi, followed by smaller urban centers and more rural areas affected by conflict such as Shirqat, Tel Afar, and Baiji. Not surprisingly, this is similar to the distribution in CLCI database that has greater coverage in these areas, which also have larger population sizes.

15