 Good morning everyone once again. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Great. Okay, as introduced earlier, my name is Missa Loboalia. The work we are presenting here is based on our work with WIDA and using the micro-Zamut, which is the Zambian version. And what we are doing here is trying to just look at alternatives for social assistance reform in Zambia. And so I'll be presenting on two programs. The first one is the Farmer Input Support Program, which was started in 2002, which basically provides subsidized inputs to farmers. This was a poverty reduction program that was put in place as a response to deal with droughts that the country had faced in the late 1990s. And part of that was basically to look at poverty reduction, food security, and then address issues of nutrition as well. Over time, the program has reformed. So the program initially started and would distribute 850 kg bags of fertilizer to farmers and bags of seed as well. Over time, the number was halved, so farmers receive four rather than 850 kg bags and two bags or 20 kg bags of maize seed. So over time, despite implementing this program for more than two decades, poverty reduction has been very slow. Latest results, which we have in the country, still show that 76% of the rural population live in poverty despite implementing this program for over two decades. Of course, there are also other issues around the program. Partly, stakeholders of race concern and local evidence has shown that the program has poor targeting, also wasteful expenditure. And then there is also evidence that you have other beneficiaries, such as those that are successful, land-owning small-scale farmers and commercial farmers are also benefiting from this particular program. The program also has a hybrid system in terms of delivery. The government at some point introduced what was known as an electronic voucher system. Which allowed farmers to obtain these inputs from the local private agri-shops as opposed to physically delivering the inputs because then there were high costs that the government had faced in terms of procuring this fertilizer and then transporting it across the country to deliver it to farmers. However, government seems to have still pushed back and moved to physical delivery. When you look at other aspects as well in terms of expenditure, in 2021, the government had planned to spend 5.7 billion quatcha, but resulted or ended up at the end of the year spending 12 billion quatcha, which is more than twice what they had budgeted for. So in that year spent over 590 million quatcha on this particular program. So this also had led to, as some of you may know, Zambia getting into debt stress and also reaching a point where we're trying to restructure our debt. So this has been quite a topical program. In terms of single items on our budget, this must be one of the largest single items that government spends its money on. And so when we look at reforming this particular program, we were interested in looking at firstly, has it been meeting its objective on poverty reduction? And what does that mean and how can we pick other programs? So one of the things that we looked at is reforming it into an existing program, which is a social cash transfer. So consideration on how do we move to reform this particular program that's ineffective, has high expenditure and move it to a social cash transfer program that is delivered with relatively cheap administrative costs. And so one of the things that we did is we basically considered what this program is like. So the program firstly gives net benefit in terms of quatcha terms 1700 quatcha, which translates to 142 quatcha per month. So farmers are required to contribute a 400 quatcha and this is basically in the simulation and then the input is valued at 2100 quatcha. So this is basically in the model. But in reality, there are also other costs. For example, government imports this fertilizer. So the cost is far much higher than the 2100 which is actually simulated in the model. And then obviously, like I gave an example, so farmers are supposed to have a net subsidy of 1700 quatcha per year, but we see that in 2019 the actual expenditure was 3000 quatcha per year. So it was 3000 quatcha per year per farmer. So it means the difference between 1700 and 3000 which is the difference of 1300 goes into the administration costs or at least gives you an idea of what the administration costs because the farmer is only receiving the 1700. So again, this just shows the high administrative costs that are attached to this program. Then we considered moving or reforming this particular program into the social cash transfer program, which basically delivers at the time 90 quatcha per month to each beneficiary household and households with members that have severe disabilities receive double this amount, which is 1800 and 80 quatcha. So if you look at this particular program, the social cash transfer, it delivers in a year to each beneficiary around 1080 quatcha compared to the cost of the farmer input support program. Now one of the things that like I mentioned, we basically create this hypothetical policy that we model using the 2019 policy system of the Zambian version of the model which is the micro-Zamod. One of the reasons why we use the 2019 model was we were trying to simulate in normal times. So we try to avoid the shocks or at least the data being affected by the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. So we basically look at that and then we focus on what the public expenditure would look like and the poverty reduction. So in terms of reform, one of the things that we try to do is we completely abolish the farmer input support program, then redistribute those savings to the social cash transfer program. One of the things that we also try to do there is we expand the eligibility criteria. As I mentioned earlier, on the farmer input support program, we actually have farmers that are not vulnerable. So households that are not vulnerable benefiting. So what we do as part of the reforms is we expand the eligibility criteria for the social cash transfer to be able to capture those farmers that ideally would be vulnerable and would completely lose out their benefits. So that they are then captured under this new reform social cash transfer program. The other thing that we do as well is we basically increase the benefits that are received to this household. So like I earlier mentioned, households we're receiving 90 kwacha per month. We basically increase this almost more than double it to 200 kwacha per household in this new program. And then we also double it 400 kwacha for households that have members with disabilities. And like I mentioned earlier, the other thing that we do is we also expand the eligibility criteria. And so this is what the results basically look like. So in terms of the expenditure on social transfers at baseline, government is spending 3.3 billion. And then this increases as a result of the expansion. Firstly, like I said, we increase the transfer amount and then we also increase the number of beneficiaries. So what we then have there is the impact results in a 1.1 billion additional expenditure for the government. And then when we look at from the baseline, this was the cost in terms of the FISP. This is what we model and this does not take into account administrative costs. So after the reform, we have zero there. The social cash transfer benefits increase significantly by 2.3. And then other benefits remain untouched. Other social benefits. When we look at the total number of beneficiaries, at the time, we had the total number of beneficiaries of 1.6, the combination of the two programs. After the reform, that number significantly drops to 670,000. So almost a million are moved out of this particular program. And then basically what we do here is the number of beneficiaries of this new reform program increased slightly. So meaning we have 50,000 that we now we're falling under the farmer input support program and under the expanded criteria are able to be captured under this particular program. So then we also look at what the impact is on poverty. So one of the things that we did firstly, I forgot to mention as we were considering the two programs is we initially completely start with abolishing the social cash transfer first and look at what that does to poverty. And then we also completely abolish the farmer input support program and see what that does to poverty. Firstly, to be able to get an idea of which program has a higher impact on poverty. And so what this gives us overall is that this is with the new reform. We see that we have the minus 1.7% reduction in poverty rates across all households. This is despite removing almost one million beneficiaries that we're sitting under that particular program. We still see that we achieve we still achieve the goal of reducing poverty. We also see that the reduction is much higher amongst female headed households, households with children, and also households with older persons. And then obviously just to confirm what the findings are is that the reform of moving to the social cash transfer compared to the farmer input support program is more effective in reducing poverty. And then obviously one of the things that we consider is that the poverty impact is relatively small, quite significant, but relatively small at 1.7%. But we note that the amount of transfers that are received to the household or provided the households is still very small. The 200 quarcha that we double from the 90 quarcha is still far below the poverty line of 229 quarcha for households. So we see that in the recommendations, obviously, one of the things that we talk about and which is very important, I won't skip up, I won't talk to these because I've already talked about them, is that in terms of maximizing our poverty impact, we need to look at increasing the quality of the transfers, which basically looks at improving the capital value. Thank you.