Every Conditional Cash Transfers and Social Protection programme has targeting issues. Targeting is one of the most important issues in any pro-poor policies. As the word itself explains, it simply means to target the poor people or households. The fundamental role of targeting is to determine who to gain benefits from proposed social policies. A programme with good targeting to the poor could have better results in terms of cost-effectiveness.

Therefore, while increasing the demand of effectiveness on development policies, the need of accurate targeting for delivering benefits to right people has been being further requested in recent years.

However, the method of targeting is not as simple as its concept. There are many ways of targeting have been invented and implemented in development fields.

1. Means Testing

A means test is usually based on the economic standard of targeting. Therefore, it seeks to collect a complete set of household income or expenditure.

2. Proxy Means Testing

A proxy means test provides a score for beneficiary households based on the quantity and quality of their asset, dwellings, household members, occupations and any other household characteristics.

3. Community-based Targeting

Community-based targeting requires leaders or other members of communities to select families or people to be awarded with proposed interventions.

4. Geographic Targeting

With geographic targeting, beneficiaries are simply determined by locations.

5. Demographic Targeting

Demographic targeting is done by commonly choosing certain age groups.

6. Self-targeting

Self-targeting often provide eligibility to all people. By providing benefits which attract only the poor people, such programmes can exclude the better-off.

Each targeting method has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, a means test is more rigorous but expensive than self-targeting. The practitioners need to choose these tools in regional contexts.

Bibliography
World Bank (website) Targeting.
Eldis (website) Targeting.