Burkina Faso is a poor landlockedcountry with a narrow natural resource base and a rapidlyexpanding population of 15.8 million. This report, with thetechnical support of United Nations Children's Fund(UNICEF), provides a detailed, updated inventory of theexisting social safety net programs and suggests policymeasures that could improve their coverage, efficiency,relevance, and financial sustainability. This report showsthat the scope and coverage of the existing social safetynet system is too limited and that most interventions arefairly small in scale and designed as temporary programs. Onaverage, excluding fuel subsidies, spending on social safetynet programs was about 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product(GDP) from 2005 to 2009 - from 0.3 percent in 2005 to 0.9percent in 2009, while about 20 percent of the population isfood insecure and lives permanently in chronic poverty.Universal fuel subsidies are very expensive (0.7 percent ofGDP in 2007) and have a very limited impact on the poorestdocile (84 percent of the benefits go to the non poor).Among the remaining programs, food transfers are the mainform of social safety net programs in Burkina Faso,accounting for 69 percent of total Social Safety Net (SSN)spending and over 80 percent of all estimated SSNbeneficiaries in 2009 (excluding fuel subsidies). However,most of the financing for social safety net programs comesfrom external resources.
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