Opinion: Who Gets Counted? Governance and Accountability in Identifying Female Beneficiaries for IDPoor

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By Neth Chanmonyneath

IPF

Future Forum's junior research fellow, Neth Chanmonyneath was published in The Cambodianess on March 23rd, 2026. Check out the original article HERE, and read it below!

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FILE: Women, displaced after clashes between Thai and Cambodian soldiers, have dinner in front of their shelter at an evacuation centre on the grounds of a pagoda in Banteay Meanchey province on February 4, 2026. Photo by AFP

While Cambodia has made significant strides in poverty reduction initiatives, the IDPoor program remains an integral pillar of the nation’s social protection framework by channeling social and economic assistance to vulnerable households.

The IDPoor Program is designed and managed by the Ministry of Planning which operates within 1,636 commune and sangkat councils. 

Despite the program’s robust framework and implementation, governance and accountability pose potential challenges in ensuring that the effective delivery reaches those who need it the most. Eligibility criteria to identify the poor had often been inconsistently applied, leading to gaps in coverage and potential exclusion of the most vulnerable households, in particular 87.6 percent of women engaged in informal employment. 

This raises two critical governance questions: how should the government decentralize the registration system, and which subnational actors should be granted the authority to manage and verify beneficiary data at the local level?

 Policy Problem: Implementation Challenges in the IDPoor Program

 According to the Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025 published by UNDP, roughly one in six Cambodians live in poverty. Through the IDPoor Program, vulnerable households are eligible to obtain official poverty status and social protection benefits which include cash transfers, health equity funds, scholarships, and other state-supported assistance programs.

Despite its strategic importance, there are two potential key challenges affecting how the IDPoor Program is utilized.

First, the effectiveness of this access pathway depends largely on the household’s ability to navigate the registration system and to be accurately included in the poverty database.

For poor families living in remote areas, access to government services is limited which makes travel to commune offices long and time-consuming with complex administrative procedures and paperwork. It is worth noting that the IDPoor Program relies on a family registration book to verify the household composition and confirm eligibility criteria.

This document sits at the center of Cambodia’s civil registration and social protection system and recognizes men as the only one and head of household. Under this single-headed system, women have limited legal decision-making powers within their households.

In some cases, women are still not registered when they become the primary breadwinner during their husband’s absence. As a result, the household records will be incomplete or inaccurate, leading to the exclusion of eligible members from the program as the family registration book does not reflect the household’s actual composition.

This undermines accountability and trust in the IDPoor system, especially among households who believe they are eligible but are not recognized.

Last, decentralization of the registration and verification process has resulted in an uneven implementation capacity at the sub-national level. While decentralization aimed to improve responsiveness and accountability, in practice, the implementation has resulted in inconsistent application and translation of eligibility criteria.

The technical expertise of commune officials also varies significantly, especially their administrative and digital literacy. With limited oversight and irregular monitoring mechanisms, commune officials lack technical capacity to conduct standardized poverty assessment and to update the correct beneficiary data.

Moreover, poverty is not static; households move in and out of vulnerability criteria. Thus, without a timely record of data collection, the program struggles to reflect the changing realities, which reduces the program’s capacity to reach the targeted beneficiaries.

Policy Recommendation: Decentralization and Gender-Responsive Targeting in the IDPoor Program

First, roles and responsibilities within the IDPoor Program should be clearly redefined to establish the structured model of decentralization that gives operational authority and decision-making power to commune officials and sangkat officials.

Given their close proximity and contextual knowledge of local community ‘s vulnerability dynamics, commune officials should be empowered to conduct the poverty / household assessments, verify beneficiary data, and manage regular updates for the poverty registry data.

In this structure, strategic direction, data standardization, and program integrity should remain under the supervision of the Ministry of Planning while administrative oversight in terms of the IDPoor registration process is coordinated by the Ministry of Interior and fiscal sustainability is monitored by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

This division of authority gives subnational actors the flexibility to manage implementation effectively, while the ministry enforces uniform eligibility criteria and safeguards program integrity. In doing so, the framework reduces institutional ambiguity, minimizes duplication of roles and responsibilities, and supports timely, effective delivery—ensuring that targeted beneficiaries receive benefits equitably.

Last, the IDPoor Program should adopt the gender-responsive targeting reform to address the exclusion embedded with household identification system and family registration book.

Given that registration to the IDPoor Program relies on a family registration book which traditionally recognizes men as the head of household, this institutional design should be revisited to reflect Cambodia’s ongoing socio-economic activities, especially considering that there is a high proportion of women engaged in informal employment.

In coordination with the Ministry of Planning, Ministry of Interior and relevant stakeholders in each commune area, the reform should opt for flexible recognition for female-headed households and primary female earners in case of husband’s absence due to migration, separation and death. 

This flexibility reduces exclusion errors and ensures that women who bear the economic responsibility are recognized as direct beneficiaries. In this sense, the commune officials should be assigned the authority to validate on de facto household leadership arrangements, even if the arrangement is not legally reflected in the official civil household registration system.

With accurate records in the number of females in each area and their household responsibilities, the commune officials are able to identify the eligible female beneficiaries whose income fall under a certain level of the program's threshold and improve target accuracy. Once the data is collected, it should be systematically integrated into centralized and gender-disaggregated registry data that allows for shared updates and verification from the Ministry levels.

Moving Forward for Cambodia

Cambodia can take Vietnam as an example of integrating a decentralized social protection system with gender-responsive targeting.

In Vietnam, commune and provincial level authorities are given the decision-making authority and clear legal mandates to implement national programs, while central ministries maintain oversight responsibilities through a two-tier governance system that ensures standardized supervision and monitoring standards.

With this model, decentralization is not just about delegating the tasks; it’s about empowering local administration with decisive leadership and better coordination to eligible beneficiaries. In coordination with Vietnam Women’s Union, this approach is operated through the GRASSP Vietnam (Gender-Responsive Age Social Protection Framework) where the program has been evaluated that over 90 percent of female beneficiaries were identified and included in social protection schemes. 

Learning from this successful implementation, Cambodia should adopt 3 key changes: decentralizing authority to commune and provincial levels, implementing gender-responsive reforms, and integrating gender-disaggregated data. 

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