Evaluating the impact of Egyptian Social Fund for Development programmes

Since its inception in 1991, the Egyptian Social Fund for Development (SFD) has spent about US$600 million supporting microcredit, and financing community development and infrastructure. Applying propensity-score matching using household survey data for 2004/05, this paper finds that SFD programmes have had clear and measurable effects, in the expected direction, for the six programmes considered here: education, health, potable water, sanitation, roads, and microcredit. SFD road projects generate benefits that, by some estimates, exceed their costs, as do health and potable water interventions; this is less evident for programmes in education and sanitation. SFD support for microcredit is strongly pro-poor; the other programmes analysed here appear to have a more modest pro-poor orientation.