Social transfer practitioners are familiar with the social divisiveness that transfers can
inadvertently create. One manifestation of this potential divisiveness is the often expressed opinion voiced in community meetings, or by key informants, that ‘we are all poor here’. This is more often than not articulated by respondents as a plain statement of fact, not as special pleading nor with undertones of victimization. This paper examines the circumstances
of small economic difference giving rise to the sentiment captured by ‘we are all poor here’, utilizing income distribution data from three SSA countries to illustrate important cautionary features that arise for the workable scaling up of cash transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper focuses on differences in per capita consumption in the long tail representing up to 60 per cent of the population that typifies national income distributions in the poorest countries.
The paper first reprises the efforts made by practitioners to narrow down eligibility to cash transfers to the destitute or ultra-poor, often defined as those unable to attain even the minimum acceptable level of calorie intake from their own efforts. Both proxy indicators and the deployment of a 10 per cent cut off point to determine the scale of cash transfers are discussed. The paper examines inter-decile per capita consumption differences for Malawi,
Zambia and Ethiopia as revealed by national budget surveys. These show that as a rule of
thumb US$2 per capita per month separates the poorest decile from the next poorest decile in the income distribution, and US$9-10 per capita per month separates the poorest decile from the sixth decile.