The Social Protection system in Mongolia is embedded in the 2012 Law on Social Welfare (currently being revised) and offers 14 types of social assistance programmes (cash transfers or services) to vulnerable groups such as the elderly, persons with disabilities, orphans, children at risk, etc, as well as a range of social services. Targeting for these programmes is established on the basis of the country’s social registry: the Integrated Household Information Database (IHID). Covering some 73% of the country’s overall population, IHID offers a dual channel for registration: relatively frequent census surveys (in 2010, 2013, 2017) accompanied by on-demand registration into its Food Stamp Programme (FSP), which triggers data entry into IHID.
We focus on the second channel of on-demand registration. This leverages capacity at local levels of implementation: households can apply at social welfare offices at soum (district) and khoroo (sub-district) level. Social welfare officers then visit the family and collect the required information to fill the PMT form, which is subsequently entered in the IHID.
One particularity of this approach is that, starting in 2007 and formally institutionalised across the country in 2013 via Government Decree No. 153, many social welfare offices are physically located within ‘one stop shop’ (OSS) centres. These gather representatives from different government agencies under one roof – including social insurance, social welfare, employment, land cadastre, civil registration and banking/notary services – with the aim of increasing accessibility, transparency, and efficiency of public service delivery. Since 2013, this approach has been complemented via ATM-like e-kiosks across the country (108 in 2016) that provide access to 21 types of government services. At the origin of these efforts is the need to guarantee accessibility of services within the most sparsely populated country in the world (Mongolia has a density of less than two people per square kilometre).
The concentration of many administrative services in one location has enabled customers to save time and money in accessing services, while simplifying the application process, resulting in high satisfaction rates within user surveys. From a social protection perspective, this has enabled increased inclusiveness of the system as well as improved coordination among the actors involved in delivering benefits and services.
While early results recorded in 2015/2016 were encouraging (and showcased within a widely circulated ILO brief), recent assessments have stressed that the OSS system has not been institutionalised across the country and that significant fragmentation still remains within the application process – posing barriers for social protection take-up. The challenge ahead will be to address these barriers, further integrating the front and back-office functions that enable the implementation of social protection floor commitments. Having a complementary – and frequent – census survey registration is an important step in this direction.
Further reading links:
- ILO brief (2016) A one-stop shop for accessible, transparent and efficient public service delivery https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/RessourcePDF.action?ressource.ressourceId=53460
- ADB (2016) Improving the Delivery of Social Protection through ICT: Case Studies in Mongolia, Nepal, and Viet Nam https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/384386/sdwp-50.pdf