MSC played a key role in the Uttar Pradesh Pro-Poor Tourism Development Project of the World Bank and the state government of Uttar Pradesh in India. This was a unique research where MSC covered multiple aspects—livelihood, tourism, gender, and youth.
MSC was tasked to identify and develop roadmaps for select creative industries in three regions of the state that have a large tourist footfall—Agra, Braj region, and the Buddhist Circuit. Under this project, a key task was to design a livelihood program for women artisans and developed a roadmap for the creative activities value chain. This involved assessing women’s livelihood activities that the tourism industry could promote.
The program has an impact on more than 3,000 women artisans in the state. At the time of writing, the second rollout and expansion phase was under development. The overall project amounted to USD 57 million and was funded by the World Bank Group.
The Government of India runs the largest food security program in the world. It covers about 850 million people with an annual budget of about USD 25 billion. Under this program, the government provides subsidized food grains to the beneficiaries through a network of fair price shops. Estimates indicate that about 40-50% of this benefit fails to reach the intended beneficiaries.
MSC worked with the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and the Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to assess pilot-tests of different approaches to convert the existing food subsidies into Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). The objectives of these pilots were to reduce leakage and to target real beneficiaries. This resulted in the adoption of the Biometric Authentication, Physical Uptake (BAPU) model for DBT and digitization of the Public Distribution System (PDS). This system has an impact on a large part of 850 million beneficiaries of this program.
MSC also helped the government to assess the readiness to conduct cash transfer pilot pilots at four places across India. After our recommendations, these pilots were designed and conducted at three places. MSC also helped evaluate the implementation of these pilots to improve processes and gauge perception of beneficiaries.
Given the growing focus around the world on refugees, MSC set-out to derive insights on refugee digital payments. We conducted secondary research on refugee initiatives in other countries, followed by research with two staff from Airtel Uganda. The Airtel research enabled us to assess Airtel’s level of support, to obtain insights on how the company works on Know Your Customer (KYC) issues and liquidity management related to refugee payments.
MSC conducted research with DanChurch Aid (DCA) to gather insights into their experience in supporting refugee payments. Our study of super-agents and money agents assessed their level of engagement, KYC requirements, and experience in supporting refugee payments. The MSC team conducted research with beneficiaries to understand their user experience. We conducted research with market vendors to understand their user-experience and the level and nature of support to refugee payments.
At the time of writing, Airtel Uganda was making a growing proportion of the payments to the 1.4 million-plus refugees in the camps in northern Uganda.
UNHCR Zambia had been providing cash assistance to refugees in the Meheba Refugee settlement camp through the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). This project designed and implemented the digitization of UNHCR’s cash-based interventions (CBI) in the camp.
UNHCR provides initial assistance to newly arrived refugees and continuous support to vulnerable refugees. However, UNHCR face challenges in delivering and refugees in receiving cash. The project investigated and addressed the challenges that stakeholders faced in cash disbursement through digitizing cash payments.
MSC collaborated to design and test the digitization of cash payments. These are now being scaled up with a view to digitizing the majority of payments to refugees in Zambia. Lessons from the project, in particular, the streamlined processes MSC developed for digital payments, are to be replicated in other sites where UNHCR has been digitizing payments.
The Indian government subsidizes LPG (cooking gas) for eligible low-income beneficiaries. MSC designed processes to route the subsidy to the bank account of beneficiaries. After the Indian government implemented the process and removed duplicate entries in the beneficiaries’ database, about 35.6 million duplicate accounts out of the total 182 million were eliminated from the system.
Upon a successful roll-out of routing the LPG subsidy, MSC helped the government to improve the execution and communication of the program. We also helped to prepare and structure the “Give It Up” campaign, under which economically better off people were urged to give up their subsidy. As a result, over 10 million people in the country gave up their subsidies. The government estimates a savings of about USD 3.23 billion through the implementation of these reforms. The success of this program convinced the government to move to digitize social benefits transfers across a range of initiatives.
The government redistributed the savings from this program by providing free cooking gas and cook stoves to low-income households under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) initiative. After PMUY launched, MSC helped the government to assess the implementation. We conducted three rounds of assessment for the program, which resulted in important changes to delivery approaches and safety messages, with an impact on nearly 50 million rural and urban households.
The impact of Ujjwala has been transformational. MSC’s studies show that this program had an impact on health, gender empowerment, and the social structure in rural areas. MSC also provided recommendations to the government to improve the affordability and accessibility of LPG refills in rural areas further.
ACRE Africa provides innovative agricultural insurance products in partnership with leading insurance companies in East Africa. MSC worked with ACRE Africa to design a cost-effective, village-based, insurance product promotion model.
The intervention involved teams of trained farmers and peer-to-peer learning at the community level to promote the adoption of mobile phone-enabled crop insurance products among smallholder farmers in Kenya.
The outreach model increased adoption of the weather index seed insurance by 10% during the pilot phase. The partner has since adopted the model to reach smallholder farmers in remote rural areas of Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. By 2017, ACRE Africa was recognized as a leading provider of agricultural insurance in the region and has enabled more than 1 million farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania to access agricultural insurance. ACRE Africa worked with leading insurance companies to underwrite more than USD 75 million to mitigate against weather-related risks.