USAID Helps Georgian State TV Create Security Net For Excessed Workers
In 2004, the Georgian State TV Company was forced to dramatically downsize their work force, laying off about half of their employees. In a country already suffering from high unemployment, and with little unemployment benefits available from the government, these layoffs left many former employees and their families in extreme poverty. Admirably, employees that retained their jobs with State TV volunteered to set aside three percent of their salaries to support a fund that would assist the neediest of their former co-workers.
State TV management requested USAID’s help to develop a fair and transparent way to ensure that the fund money, which was still not enough to support all of the laid-off workers, would be allocated to the families most in need.
USAID could not employ a simple “means test”, which would allocate funds to families based on their household income, because there is no way to verify a person’s income or other economic resources in Georgia, and besides, measuring only income is not a reliable indicator of economic well-being in a transitional economy like Georgia’s. Instead, USAID developed a “proxy-means test”, which is designed to get information about a wide variety of factors related to economic well-being, including: household composition (sex, age, health, education); housing quality (including availability of electricity, gas, and water); income and assets; and food adequacy.
Working closely with local researchers, USAID developed questions to measure each factor and
also created an “Index of Economic Well-being.” A survey was given in-person to over 700 laid-
off workers in late 2004. Survey responses were used to rank each household according to the “Index of Economic Well-being”. Based on the scores, State TV selected 120 former employees
to receive assistance in the amount of 100 GEL (approximately $55 USD) per month. By the
end of 2005, more than $72,000 of donated funds will reach these employees and their families.
Equally important, the process for selecting beneficiaries was perceived as fair and transparent
by both current and former State TV employees and their families.
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