The Inter-American Development Bank today announced a $4.5 million loan to Ecuador to help establish an objective and transparent system to identify and select beneficiaries of social programs. The system will enable the government to target social expenditure to the country's poorest families.
The resources will enable institutions in charge of carrying out social programs gain indispensable information for programming their activities, improving interagency coordination and control.
The data collection component will finance gathering information in approximately 1.6 million households, 640,000 of them urban and 960,000 rural.
After the project is carried out, the country will have a database containing the social profile of all families requiring some social assistance support, permitting a better and more efficient allocation of scarce resources.
The project will be carried out by the Ministry of Social Welfare.*
The IDB loan is for a 25-year term, with a three-year grace period, at the variable interest rate, now 6.77 percent. Local counterpart resources total $500,000.