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CBMS was designed principally as an instrument to monitor poverty at the local level. However, the system also lends itself to other uses, such as assessing the impacts of specific public investment and donor programs, tracking progress toward achieving the MDGs at local levels, and building up databases on vulnerability for use in early warning systems. The use of CBMS is also now being mainstreamed in gender-responsive budgeting in some regions, helping governments and planners allocate resources more equitably.

Monitoring public expenditures and donor programs

As demonstrated in this book, CBMS is more than simply a poverty-monitoring exercise. It is a process through which communities can actively participate in public policy to identify appropriate interventions, plan investments, and hold public officials to account: it is thus an instrument of good governance at the local level.

Communities and civil society partners involved with local governments in implementing CBMS around the world have attested to being empowered through the knowledge gained of their communities and the opportunity provided to work with researchers and local government planners in deciding what interventions will best improve well-being. This kind of social contract between communities and local governments has also led to an active interest in public budgets and development plans. Local governments have found it useful to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of spending in a more transparent fashion. They have also used CBMS to obtain resources from central governments and donor agencies.

In Cambodia, for example, the National Institute of Statistics, in partnership with the governor, local government department heads, and commune councillors in Kratie province, have used CBMS to effectively plan targeted development programs and to regularly monitor expenditures. They also see the system as an expression of good local governance, and recognize that this will help attract resources from external donors. Similarly in other Asian countries, CBMS has demonstrated its usefulness as a policy instrument at the local level for budgetary oversight and resource mobilization.

With the regular conduct of censuses, CBMS can help identify a menu of cost-effective poverty-reduction initiatives to meet different needs. The impact of poverty-reduction programs and projects can be regularly monitored and assessed. This can also lead to further support of effective programs and the termination of ineffective ones.

CBMS aims to facilitate the rational allocation of resources. This is achieved by ensuring that the necessary information is available for evidence-based planning and budgeting. A more specific recent initiative is the use of CBMS to facilitate “gender-responsive” budgeting (Budlender et al. 2006).

Gender-responsive budgeting initiatives primarily aim to ensure the equitable allocation of government budgets. The goals are

• to reflect the different needs and priorities of men and women, girls and boys, in policies and budgets;
  
  
• to signal that these should not be assumed to be identical; and
  
  
• to ensure that the services and other elements funded through budgets cater to different needs and priorities.

Gender-responsive budgeting is not about having a separate budget for women, allotting a specific amount of money to women-specific programs, nor is it about dividing the budget equally. Rather, it is a mechanism for mainstreaming gender into the entire budget process, from analyzing the gendered situation that needs to be addressed to formulating plans and budgets that take into account gender- specific needs, to monitoring and evaluating whether funded activities have helped to rectify gender imbalances.

A pilot project to facilitate gender-responsive budgeting through CBMS was carried out in Escalante City in the Philippines in 2006. As Godofredo Reteracion, Escalante’s city planning and development coordinator, explains, disaggregating the data by gender revealed that child mortality and malnutrition rates were higher for girls than for boys, and that women were under-represented in the labour force and in community and political life. Boys, on the other hand, had higher rates of non-attendance at school. The CBMS process was enhanced by focus group discussions to gather information that could not be collected from structured questionnaires. A computerized template was then developed to facilitate planning and budgeting to respond to the problems identified through the CBMS. This template allows the impact of the programs to be monitored by gender.

For gender-responsive budgeting, CBMS fills the data vacuum that hampers both pre- and post-budget analysis. It also provides a platform to regularly monitor the impacts of budgets in terms of their gender responsiveness.

The pilot in the Philippines has shown that it is indeed possible to formulate gender-responsive plans and budgets using the “engendered” CBMS. In Escalante, for example, the rather indiscriminate use of the gender and development budget was stopped and the funds were redirected to programs that responded to CBMS findings — a supplemental school feeding program, for example, women’s health and safe motherhood programs, maternal and child care, and free hospitalization at local government hospitals, among other measures, were included in the city’s 2008 gender and development plan and budget.

The need to track progress toward achieving the MDGs at sub-national levels has increased the demand for CBMS. And as has been shown, there is a significant correspondence between MDG and CBMS indicators.

Greater advocacy is needed, however, to inform other countries about the usefulness of CBMS in tracking MDG progress at the local level. There is a general assumption that monitoring the goals is a task for national statistical agencies mandated to report aggregates to national MDG coordinators. But the real value of tracking progress lies at the local level, where regional disparities and differences can reveal different circumstances and socioeconomic factors, which can be isolated and analyzed by CBMS.

Building capacity is necessary for countries to be able to do this. The CBMS Network has an important role to play in sharing knowledge about how this can be accomplished.

By providing relevant information at household and individual levels, CBMS can provide details about the poor, not just by province or district, but by municipality and lower administrative levels. More importantly, because CBMS is a census and not a sample survey, it puts names and faces to the poor. And with the use of CBMS poverty maps, it is also possible to provide their address.

Why target? Because there are limited public resources and it is crucial that these benefit the neediest. The application of CBMS for targeting subsidies such as cash transfers, health entitlements, or credit can ensure that the intended transfers reach the poor and that there are overall cost savings.

How do we identify the poor using CBMS data? Composite indicators can be obtained from the CBMS core indicators to reflect the multi-dimensional nature of poverty. The CBMS composite index combines the 14 core indicators, indicating the number of unmet needs relating to health, nutrition, education, income, employment, housing, access to water and sanitation facilities, and peace and order in a household. A CBMS composite index of 4 indicates that 4 out of the 14 household needs represented by the core indicators are not met. Alternatively, a “proxy means” test model can also be obtained from CBMS data: by using data on assets owned, socio-economic characteristics, demographic characteristics, and spatial attributes, a measure of income or poverty status can be estimated. The estimated income or poverty status can then be used to determine eligibility to a program.

In short, CBMS can facilitate targeting by providing information on eligible beneficiaries for specific programs. Sector-specific indicators can also be used to identify who should receive the intervention.

CBMS can provide an early warning of impending social crisis. Indicators can show how households and individuals are being affected by natural or manufactured shocks, and governments can then implement appropriate interventions to mitigate the impacts of these shocks.

In 1998, for example, Filippinos were living through a severe El Niño and an Asia-wide financial crisis. A CBMS survey in the Philippines at this time showed increased malnutrition among young children and an increased drop-out rate of school-age children. With this data, governments were able to design targeted interventions.

The current global financial crisis is the most recent example of a manufactured shock. CBMS can provide sentinel sites, or “poverty observatories,” that can monitor the impact of the financial crisis on poverty. Indicators of unemployment, school participation, and malnutrition, for example, will be useful in monitoring short-term impact and in designing interventions.

Extending the use of CBMS for these and other purposes requires commitment by all levels of government. It also requires establishing formal links between national and local poverty monitoring systems. National systems can build the capacity of local government units to collect, process, and analyze data, and they can provide the statistical standards to ensure the comparability of CBMS and national survey data.

The simplicity and ease by which CBMS can be standardized at the local level also has enormous potential for integration into national poverty monitoring systems. For example, the 2004 PRSP for Burkina Faso adopts this approach by setting out only

10 core indicators to monitor human poverty, which corresponds to the CBMS.

CBMS has been expanding throughout Asia and Africa, and is now taking root in Latin America, demonstrating its versatility as a poverty-monitoring tool. But, as has been shown, CBMS is not a fixed system that is transported from one country to the next. While some basic features are necessary regardless of location, the list of indicators should be adapted to the local context. And differences in government structures across countries can also imply different focal institutions.

To date, CBMS has been piloted in 15 countries. Within these countries, greater advocacy is needed to institutionalize the system and make it part of local governments’ regular activities, with national governments exercising an oversight function.

Sharing CBMS with other countries is now imperative. Partnerships with international organizations are key to spreading the message of CBMS’ many uses. For instance, an experts group meeting on CBMS was organized by UNESCAP in 2006. The results of this meeting, presented during UNESCAP’s 2006 Committee on Poverty Reduction meeting, have raised other countries’ awareness of CBMS and has stimulated demand for its application. Similar initiatives would help put CBMS on other governments’ agendas.

While local poverty-monitoring systems have been developed in various countries in Asia and Africa, indicators that can measure different dimensions of poverty in other regions need to be developed and tested, and applied to show the faces of poverty in different contexts. There is also a need for further research to develop what can be termed as non-conventional indicators to capture dimensions of poverty that are not ordinarily measured and monitored, such as empowerment or human security.

Further research is also needed to enhance the use of CBMS for evidence-based policy-making and program implementation. One of the major uses of CBMS data is to identify the poor so that poverty-reduction programs can be directed to them. While this is already being done in several countries by using simple indicators, further research needs to be undertaken to come up with additional methodologies that use different indicators for identifying the poor.

Research is also needed to identify which poverty reduction programs truly are effective. The short-term and long-term impact of existing programs can be evaluated using CBMS data, particularly when CBMS has been installed for several years. This research could point to the need to further modify the CBMS design to include additional indicators to facilitate monitoring and evaluation functions.

Finally, as the gender-responsive budgeting project in the Philippines has shown, CBMS has proven itself to be an important if not fundamental instrument in guiding local governments in budget planning and evaluation. Further research is needed, however, to show how CBMS can be applied more vigorously on the expenditure side. Additional research on how CBMS data can be fed more systematically into planning and budgeting processes would also ensure more evidence-based decision-making. There is growing interest, for example, in linking CBMS more deeply to performance-based management of public budgets — at the local level, in different contexts, and particularly under different degrees of decentralization.

Interest in CBMS is also growing in countries that are attempting to implement participatory budgeting systems. The convergence between CBMS as a participatory monitoring system for public expenditure at the local level, and performance-based budgeting systems in local governments presents common ground for new explorations in governance and budgetary systems.

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