The COVID‐19 pandemic pushed many households into poverty, demonstrating both the fragility of the middle class to external shocks and the importance of temporary shocks in determining poverty. Social programs took on particular importance during the pandemic and transfers positively impacted middle‐income households that faced a labor market shock. Lessons learned from this crisis can help improve the design of social programs and meet the challenges of responding to future crises swiftly.

Like other countries, in the past years Colombia used data from their SISBEN social registry and pre‐crisis poverty classifications to introduce new social programs and relied on proxy means tests (PMTs) to select program beneficiaries. However, PMTs effectively predict the permanent component of poverty but are less effective at capturing transitory changes in income. During crises, the transitory component of income plays a larger role in determining households’ economic well‐being, implying that PMTs calculated with household data collected before the crisis could lead to larger errors in the selection of beneficiaries. Most importantly, vulnerable households could be excluded when temporary government support is most crucial.

The Inter‐American Development Bank (IDB) collaborated with the National Planning Department of Colombia to assess the effectiveness of its targeting mechanisms and to examine to what extent flexible targeting mechanisms could include the structurally poor and also allow the entry and exit of households that fall into poverty due to transitory shocks.

For this purpose, Sistemas Integrales Consulting designed and implemented the SISBEN Targeting Survey, carried out by phone with national coverage. The survey used the SISBEN social registry as a sampling frame, including beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries from every socioeconomic status, and collected data about households’ financial health and resilience, consumption, employment, exposure to unexpected health events and asset ownership.

Like in all its surveys, data quality was crucial for Sistemas Integrales Consulting. The survey implemented a comprehensive Quality Control system that tracked data quality indicators via an online dashboard and audited interview recordings by specially trained agents.