State support programs during the pandemic lack a comprehensive policy to achieve their goal, concluded the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval).
“It is necessary to have a comprehensive national and coordinated strategy; what is observed is the generation of specific actions and programs that do not constitute a comprehensive and structured policy, ”says the Panorama study of social programs and actions in the states to respond to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic .
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In its study, Coneval identified 667 state social programs and actions aimed at supporting the population against the health, economic and social crisis caused by the health emergency. The entity with the most programs is Tamaulipas with 72, followed by Morelos and Campeche with 50 and 43, respectively.
“However, a greater number of programs will not necessarily generate a better result; the existence of various actions may reflect a greater disaggregation of a public problem ”, warns the Council.
The report highlights that there is no record that 279 of these state actions used evidence to prepare them.
“In the context of the pandemic, having monitoring and evaluation elements is even more important, since they allow the identification and prioritization of actions, follow up on progress and evaluate the results. In this way, there is evidence of what does work or of opportunities for improvement in the design or implementation of policies, programs or actions, ”says the agency.
Among Coneval’s recommendations for state programs is the design of instruments to measure their impact, since it identified that, for example, 49.6 percent lack a list of beneficiaries and 52.9 percent do not have an evaluation strategy.
“It is important that the necessary tools to design, monitor and evaluate interventions are documented and made public; what was identified is that very few of these tools are public ”.