Economic Empowerment Program in the Ministry of Social Development for 2019

- The annual report of the State Audit and Administrative Control Bureau (SAACB) for 2021 contained a financial report titled "Economic Empowerment Program, in the Ministry of Social Development for the year 2019", and the Bureau included the following some of its observations in this regard:

- There are no standard evidentiary documents for the work of the Empowerment Department and the directorates that include work mechanisms at all stages of implementation..!

- There are no market studies available during 2019 that could be utilized to direct projects, such as "the Anira project.." ..and others, toward market requirements, and in the process of training project beneficiaries to guide and advise them toward market needs,... which may lead to the duplication of funded projects,.. and there is difficulty in marketing the products..etc.!

- There is no clear and approved mechanism for the method of distributing projects across population clusters, which may lead to a lack of reasonable assurance regarding the correctness of selecting the clusters and the mechanism for distributing projects, and therefore, duplication of projects in the same geographic area..!

- The development directorates did not evaluate the targeted families according to specific forms, and did not assign a score to all beneficiaries and sort the most in-need beneficiaries among them, so as to make a comparison among families, which does not provide assurance regarding the correctness of the procedures in selecting beneficiary families, and affects the principle of equality among beneficiaries...!

- There are families benefiting from the program that were not registered in the Ministry’s beneficiaries database for the Ministry’s services and programs. The standards were not applied in a way that provides assurance regarding the correctness of the process of selecting beneficiaries by the directorates, as it was found that there are selection criteria that were not applied to all targeted families, such as the number of family members, or the presence of orphans in the family, or a female-headed household.

- There are no standardized and approved forms across all directorates regarding the initial visits to verify the suitability of the family for empowerment projects according to targeting criteria, and consequently there is no assurance regarding the correctness of family information that carries weight in the criteria..!

- There is no documented methodology for the mechanism of following up individual projects in terms of the number of follow-up visits and the follow-up mechanism, where it was found that there are projects that were not followed up, and other projects for which follow-up was conducted by telephone without a field visit, in addition to projects that have not been followed up for a long time, which may indicate the continuity of the project..!

- There are no performance indicators to measure performance at the level of the overall objective and the sub-objectives of the Economic Empowerment Program in terms of measuring the size of the family that has been economically empowered...

- The "Anira" project and the "World Food" project were not evaluated at the results level, nor were the negative aspects identified and future proposals put forward..!

- There is no evaluation of individual projects that is based on indicators and standards to measure project performance, in order to measure the achievement that has been realized and to measure the ability of projects to combat poverty, to move families from aid to self-reliance.!

· Date: 6-9-2022