ESP programme has over the last five years been implementing the Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment (SAGE) programme. Two programme components were implemented namely; the Senior Citizens Grant (SCG) in all the 15 districts and the Vulnerable Family Grant (VFG) in 61 of the 15 pilot districts. The VFG is designed to target poor and vulnerable households which have extreme labour capacity deficiencies and high dependency ratios. It was specifically intended to reach households containing a high proportion of older people, children – particularly orphans - and people with disabilities – also known as Labour Capacity and Dependency (LCD) Targeting.
If present in a beneficiary household, adult women are selected to be the actual recipient of the transfers. Targeting for the VFG was based on national civil registration datasets generated through a civil registration exercise carried out by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), but with application of numerical scores to the members of each household according to age, sex, disability and orphan hood status.
Aggregate household scores are then calculated automatically in the SAGE MIS. An eligibility threshold (of 15%) is set for each district based on analysis of the UNHS 2009/10. Only those households scoring above the threshold are targeted. This is to allow distribution of beneficiaries to reflect differences in scale and depth of vulnerability between sub-counties within the district.
The VFG therefore used a set of proxy indicators based on weighted demographic characteristics to target households for eligibility for the grant. Final verification of eligibility would take place at the parish level, by Sub- County local authorities, led by the CDO. Following the end of the SAGE pilot in 2015, Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development decided to phase out the VFG with effect from November 2015. According to the MIS data, the total VFG households during that period were 13,131 in the 6 districts where the VFG was implemented. During that period, a total of 12,954,124,200/= was disbursed in the VFG districts. Before the phase out ESP made efforts to inform beneficiaries that the VFG was going to be phased out a study was conducted to establish beneficiary knowledge of the end of programme.