Signature Projects

MSC designed processes to route the subsidy for LPG (cooking gas) that the government in India provides to eligible beneficiaries. Once the LPG subsidy rolled out, MSC helped the government to improve the execution and communication of the program. The government redistributed the savings from this program to low-income households under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) initiative. After PMUY launched, MSC helped the government to assess the implementation, with an impact on nearly 50 million rural and urban households.
UNHCR Zambia had been providing cash assistance to refugees in the Meheba Refugee settlement camp. MSC was engaged to design and test the digitization of cash payments under a project that designed and implemented the digitization of UNHCR’s cash-based interventions (CBI) in the camp. At the time of writing, UNHCR would be replicating lessons from the project in other sites.
MSC collaborated with The Center for Global Development to study the perception of households on the impact of the Bhamashah program on digital governance reforms in the state of Rajasthan. The study sought to identify the main changes in the processes that have increased administrative efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery mechanisms, and the changes in perception that the reforms have had on a household’s access to services and their governance. MSC identified best practices that can be replicated in India and across the world and provided recommendations to improve the implementation further.
In India, the largest food security program in the world covers about 850 million people. MSC worked with the Indian Government to assess pilot-tests of approaches to convert the existing food subsidies into Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). MSC also helped the government to assess the readiness to conduct cash transfer pilot pilots at four places across India, and subsequently helped evaluate the implementation of these pilots to improve processes and gauge perception of beneficiaries.
MSC has conducted secondary research on refugee initiatives in a number of countries. In Uganda, we supplemented this with primary research for Airtel Uganda and DanChurch Aid (DCA), which examined the role of super-agents and mobile money agents, as well as the opportunities and challenges of using mobile money to make payments to refugees in the country. MSC’s engagements obtained insights on how these organizations dealt with, among others, issues such as identity, SIM card ownership, digital payments, and liquidity management.
Alongside Arifu and Fundación Capital, MSC received a contract from UNCDF to develop and pilot-test financial literacy programs for refugees in the oldest refugee camp in Tanzania, Nyarugusu. UNCDF piloted a program on refugee financial inclusion, within which MSC developed and tested digital and financial literacy programs for refugees. The program is slated for scale-up between 2018 and 2019, within which over 30,000 refugees and hosts would access the content to enhance their financial capabilities.

Publications/Resources

The blog highlights lessons from the digitisation of government to person (G2P) programmes in India
MSC and the Center for Global Development (CGD) assessed Bangladesh’s Primary Education Stipends Program (PESP), a gender-centric cash transfer program to improve primary school attendance rates. Over the years, benefit delivery of PESP evolved from cash disbursement to digital stipend transfers. Key evidence from our assessment shows women prefer digital transfers to cash-in-hand. Our blog shares evidence from the study using the “Design, Direct, and Digitize” (D3) framework to make a case for women beneficiaries as better contenders for G2P programs. Our blog looks beyond the impact of PESP on program outcomes—and highlights the socioeconomic implications of mobile money on women and the role PESP plays in gender equity and inclusion.
In 2017, the Government of Indonesia (GoI) began digitizing social benefit transfers to improve delivery efficiency and achieve sustainable financial inclusion. Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, was the first major social assistance payment program (G2P) digitized by the government. It provides incentives for the following: Pregnant and lactating mothers, infants, […]

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