1 In January 2019, #Tunisia approved a law that reformed its social assistance system and established the Amen Social. The new social registry is the backbone of the system to be put in place to ensure a minimum income to the poorest. See bit.ly/2WESNIS. 
2 The new registry was built on top of the previous one used to assess eligibility for the PNANF/AMG1, a #CashTransfer + free health care for extreme poor hh heads unable to work; and the AMG2, which offers subsidized health care for vulnerable hhs.
3 In a 2019 study about the feasibility of a #socialprotectionfloor in Tunisia, CRES – a local think tank – has shown that 34.7% of the working age population did not have any income security. See table 4 below from their publication: bit.ly/2zjEeTm.
4 This result is largely due to the low coverage of the PNAFN #CashTransfer, which covers only 7% of the population, while a relatively large share of the informal sector is not covered by either #SocialInsurance (CNSS) nor #SocialAssistance.
5 In a 2017 study, CRES has also compared the characteristics of PNAFN beneficiaries (poor), AMG2 (vulnerable) and the total population, finding that PNAFN and AMG 2 had a much lower occupation rate that the rest of the population. See Table below:
6 Despite the relatively large coverage of Tunisia’s social registry, around 25% of the pop. and very similar to the coverage for Morocco’s RAMED, its original bias tends to make it less suitable to capture informal workers than other similar registries.
7 Allowing on-demand registration was a crucial step to address this issue. Similarly to what was observed in the case of Morocco (see bit.ly/2WD58xs) a large proportion of #InformalWorkers seems to be excluded from existing social registries.
8 Covering #InformalWorkers via #SocialInsurance and universal SP schemes such as #ChildGrants seems an important step to establish national #SocialProtectionFloors in the aftermath of the crisis and to be better prepared for forthcoming shocks.
9 A universal #ChildGrant can both help protect families with children, and be an important shock-responsive tool, as in the case of #COVID19. If it existed in Tunisia, it would have allowed for a quicker response to confinement measures and to reach out to #InformalWorkers.
10 Studies have showed that universal #ChildGrant isn’t costly and can reduce poverty. An @IPC_IG study (bit.ly/3bf6tjh) shows they are more cost-effective than subsidies and CRES (2019) showed that it could cost less than 1% of GDP and reduce child poverty by 4.8pp.
11 We would like to thank @Unicef_Tunisie for its collaboration in the preparation of this twitter thread.
