By Nihal Zaroug.
Tripoli, 28 January, 2013:
The General National Congress (GNC) has agreed on a child benefit, where the head of a . . .[restrict]family receives a monthly LD 100 per child up to the age of 18, and continues to be paid for girls until they are married.
The benefit, which was approved yesterday, will also be paid to Libyan women married to foreigners and divorcees, as posted on the official Facebook page of the GNC media office.
Typically such benefits are means-tested to determine the eligibility of a family to receive state support. However, it is not yet clear if this is a welfare program or a social program.
Post-war Libya has had a bad track record with the disbursement of benefits and the issuance of grants. Problems are most frequently associated with the lack of official records and a mechanism to distribute payments.
Payments to former revolutionaries were fraught with controversy and mismanagement, as costs ballooned out of control. Grants were halted due to the absence of a consolidated database of claimants.
Similar issues arose with the treatment of war injured abroad, which quickly became all expenses-paid trips for an array of medical ailments. Healthcare bills, particularly in Jordan, are still outstanding.
Recently, grants of LD 1000 to buy sheep for the occasion of Eid Al Adha, were stopped due to technical problems, just one day after announcing that the monies would be transferred into Libyans’ bank accounts.
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