Welfare plan full of goals, short on details

Cash transfers to the poor and public works programs for the unemployed are spelled out in a new five-year plan the government launched yesterday in a bid to expand the country’s threadbare social welfare programs. Though full of ambitious targets and budgets, the ‘National Social Protection Strategy for the Poor and Vulnerable 2011 to 2015’ is decidedly short on details about how to get there and, critically, where the money will come from to pay for it. In its current state, the strategy appears to be more a list of what the government wants to do and when it wants to do it by. How to do all that, though, will come later…