THE CONTESTED INFLUENCE OF IFI’S OVER LABOUR AND SOCIAL PROTECTION POLICY The final challenge was the lack of INAS even further. While Vodacom assumed support and the absence of an effective responsibility for making payments via complaints’ mechanism. According to the Mpesa – which it ultimately struggled to survey, a quarter of respondents declared do – it was not responsible for the myriad that they had to pay a “success fee” to of other interactions which usually take gatekeepers to be registered in the PASD- place between INAS representatives and PE. While most beneficiaries knew that beneficiaries. Yet with resources diverted there was a complaints mechanism in to private providers there were not enough place, nearly half had no idea of where to resources to strengthen INAS’ response on go to lodge a complaint or register a stolen the ground. phone (PMSC-PS, 2020). The government tried to establish a hotline staffed by the World Food Program (WFP) but as a representative of SINED says, it was not effectively implemented: “All people could do was wait. There was no hotline where they could consult timelines or lodge complaints.” Historically, INAS has relied on thousands of quasi-volunteers at the local level called “permanentes” to disseminate information, identify potential beneficiaries and troubleshoot problems. In exchange for their work, “permanentes” receive a subsidy equivalent to a cash transfer. Although insignificant, it incentivizes collaboration by compensating volunteers for their time. However, under the guise of transparency, “permanentes” were Social Security always saw the PASD-PE as a peripheral programme. The primary objective of social protection has been to respond to the structural causes of vulnerability along the life cycle rather than idiosyncratic shocks. Nevertheless, the intensification of shocks – droughts, floods, Covid-19 – have transformed social protection into highly targeted, short-term, shock responsiveness programmes. Under the guise of Adaptive Social Protection, debates about the redistributive role of the state are simply deflected onto the household and the private sector through elusive ideas like livelihood diversification and financial inclusion. excluded from the PASD-PE, even as their The challenge facing the Mozambican workload increased exponentially, leading government is how to reconcile these to a contraction in the quality of support conflicting visions. As one official succinctly provided to recipients. put it: “We can be pretty sure that after six Ultimately, the outsourcing of the payment process fragmented the relationship between INAS and cash transfer recipients 21 Notably, the National Strategy for Basic months, PASD-PE beneficiaries will fall back into poverty, and we will lose the gains made. We have to keep working to increase the fiscal space and expand coverage. We Fast-tracking Financialization - International Financial Institutions’ Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Mozambique