Balancing Size, Quality, and Cost : Lessons from Mauritania’s Innovative Social Registry Intake and Registration Strategy

Overview & Synopsis

This technical paper from the Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program (SASPP) explores Mauritania's experience developing innovative solutions to balance data quality, inclusiveness, and costs in its social registry. The paper examines how the country has transformed the data intake and registration approach of its social registry, successfully addressing the limitations of quota-based registration while collecting basic information for all households, creating an opportunity to move toward a near-universal social registry. The paper provides an overview of Mauritania’s social registry; outlines the initial approach and implementation difficulties and details the innovative data intake and registration approach developed to overcome these challenges; explores the lessons learned; and provides recommendations for enhancing the inclusiveness and cost-effectiveness of administrator-driven processes. Mauritania's experience demonstrates that strategic methodological innovations can simultaneously increase size and reduce costs, offering valuable insights for countries designing social registries.