CNSA Targeting

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Beneficiary Criteria Overview
Beneficiary Criteria refers specifically to who is meant to benefit from an aid. With regard to aid
to the vulnerable, we can identify four types of beneficiaries (Lavalee et al 2010):
1) those who have little hope of overcoming their status because of disability or age,
2) those who are discriminated against because of some culturally defined status such as
gender, ethnicity, age, religion, caste or occupation
3) the transient poor who have fallen on hard times because of a crisis in their own lives or
the lives of a member of their family, such as in the case of illness or debt
4) disaster victims who have been hit by a widespread shock such as hurricane, earthquake,
war, or economic recession
The status of category 4, above, that of disaster victims, tends to be aggravated by inclusion in the
former categories. Specifically, in the event of a regional calamity those who tend to suffer first
and most are individuals physically weak because of disability or age, those who suffer a culturally
defined status that makes them vulnerable (such as an ethnic group or stigmatized class), and those
who are already suffering a temporary personal or household economic crisis. On the other hand,
a catastrophic shock may temporarily expose relatively well-off individuals and families to
extreme hardship, inducing the need for immediate relief in the form of medical, nutritional or
financial assistance.
It is important to emphasize again that target beneficiaries may be other than the poor or those in
need of emergency relief. Projects that focus on production may deliberately exclude those who
the most vulnerable—such as the landless or the physically or mentally incapacitated, i.e. people
incapable or unlikely to assist in augmenting production. Projects with the goal of increasing
regional production may focus on the relatively wealthy landowners. Other relatively wealthy
beneficiary targets might be businesses and banks, or scholarships to individuals living in
impoverished regions but who may not be impoverished themselves. Thus, we can add a fifth
category to beneficiary criteria:
5) Individuals, households, or institutions with capacity to increase production, thereby
elevating local living standards through increased employment, availability of goods and
services, or preservation of natural resources
Community Buy-in and Validity
An important dimension of criteria is whose criteria is it? Is the donor or implementing
organization selecting the criteria? Or is the community somehow determining the criteria? Whose
criteria is being used, how well it fits with community reality and values and whether or not the
community members accept the criteria as justifiable have a great deal to do with winning
community buy-in and avoiding conflict and resentment regarding the intervention. But buy-in
must be balanced with validity of the criteria. There are many instances where community
members do not share the objectives of the donors; where community consensus is that those who
most deserve aid are not the neediest but the hardest workers, the entrepreneurially inclined, or
even traditional elites. In cases such as these the values and goals of aid entities must somehow be
reconciled with those of the community or, at the very least, community members must be
convinced of the value of the intervention (see Himmelstine 2012).