Figure 12. A woman being carried to the SCG distribution point in Namayingo. benefit available to everyone above 80 years of age (except for former civil servants who already receive a state pension), this still leaves the issue of identifying whether someone is over 80. This relatively simple targeting mechanism has proven quite complex to administer. When the SCG was piloted in 2010–15, beneficiaries were identified through two methods. The first made use of work that the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB) was doing in partnership with UBOS to register births and deaths in the country.98 The URSB shared lists of potential beneficiaries with the SAGE programme staff who could then use these lists to identify all older people above a certain age threshold in each district it was working in. In addition to this top-down mechanism, the programme made use of community targeting by facilitating meetings with Local Council (LC1) chairpersons to validate an older person’s age. Everyone was asked to bring any form of ID they had, such as birth certificates, voter ID cards, or even baptism cards. In the absence of any form of ID, the LC1 would verify the age of the person using references to widely known local or historical events. The LC1 would then generate lists, and attach his or her signature, which would be submitted to local Community Development Officers, who in turn shared them with the SAGE programme management staff.99 They could use the results from both processes to determine who would receive the cash transfer. This process was labour intensive and relied on both strong links to local governments and a wide network of SCG programme officers working throughout the country. In the second phase of the ESP, which began in 2015, the need to roll out the programme to a much larger group of beneficiaries and districts led to a change in approach.100 As part of the proposed transition from (donor-sponsored) pilot to a permanent (government-led) programme, the operating procedures of the Programme Management Unit (PMU) were 40 Chased Away and Left to Die

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