US embassy cable - 04ANKARA6213

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 006213 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
 
AID FOR THOMAS MEFFORD AND VALERIE KWOK 
TREASURY FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS - RADKINS AND MMILLS 
NSC FOR BRYZA AND MCKIBBEN 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: EAID, SOCI, TU 
SUBJECT: A GLIMPSE OF URBAN POVERTY IN TURKEY 
 
 
 1. (Sbu) Summary: With the USG about to disburse $9 million 
to supplement a social welfare project providing cash 
payments to poor mothers who keep their children in school, 
and with $6 million in the pipeline from the Department of 
Labor with similar objectives to combat child labor, econoffs 
met with the sub-governor of Ankara,s poorest municipality 
and visited a primary school and a girl,s vocational high 
school.  The primary school in particular provided a snapshot 
of the social challenge of urban poverty in Turkey.  It is 
run-down, understaffed, overcrowded and surrounded by 
dilapidated housing.  Sub-Governor, principals, teachers and 
parents were unanimous in valuing the impact of the project 
the U.S. will help fund; they only wish the benefits could be 
rolled out more quickly to all eligible families.  End 
Summary. 
 
2. (Sbu) USAID/Washington is working with the World Bank to 
finalize a grant of $9 million in ESF funds to support the 
Turkish Social Solidarity Fund,s Conditional Cash Transfer 
(CCT) project.  (The Social Solidarity Fund is Turkey's 
social welfare agency.) This project, also supported by a 
$277.7 million loan from the World Bank, targets the poorest 
6 percent of Turkish families by providing cash payments to 
parents (usually mothers) if they keep their children in 
school.  Note: As a grant, the U.S. contribution will go 
directly to beneficiaries and will not contribute to Turkey's 
public debt burden. End Note.    Another component of the 
project will make payments to poor parents who get their 
infants vaccinated, and a third component, just getting 
underway, is to make payments to mothers who follow a 
schedule of neo-natal check-ups.   Though it took some time 
to set up the elaborate system of nationwide application, 
monitoring and payments, the project has been rapidly 
expanding in 2004 with 866,467 beneficiaries as of September, 
2004: 590,575 from the education component and 275,892 from 
the health component.   For each girl attending high school, 
a qualifying family receives the equivalent of $23 per month, 
with lesser amounts for boys, and for primary school 
students. 
 
Altindag Municipality: 
---------------------- 
 
3. (Sbu) Econoffs recently visited Altindag Municipality, the 
poorest of the seven municipalities in Ankara, in order to 
get a sense of the project,s impact in poor neighborhoods. 
Qualification for the project depends on families meeting a 
set of poverty criteria, such as number of children and 
elderly in the household, family members, employment status, 
condition of housing.  Not surprisingly, the heaviest users 
of the project are the poor sections of big cities, including 
Ankara and Istanbul, as well as cities like Gaziantep, Van 
and Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey.  In fact, the most recent 
data shows 122,084 families are eligible in Southeastern 
Anatolia alone, versus 208,102 families in all other regions 
combined. Social Solidarity Fund officials told us they are 
not targeting any particular region, but the much larger 
numbers of poor people in the Southeast have resulted in much 
larger numbers of qualifying beneficiaries under the 
project,s poverty criteria. 
 
4. (Sbu) Econoffs met first with Altindag Sub-Governor 
(Kaymakam)  Mustafa Altintas, who provided an overview of his 
municipality, particularly its social needs.  Altindag covers 
a large area in central Ankara, including the old city with 
its bustling commercial activity, Roman ruins and early 
republican-era buildings.  According to municipal statistics 
some 80% of Altindag,s population is housed in &gecekondu8 
dwellings, sloppily-constructed houses whose owners often 
lack title for the property on which they are located.  The 
2000 census put Altindag,s population at 400,000, though the 
Sub-Governor stressed that during the daytime the population 
probably exceeds one million people because so many people 
work in the district and live elsewhere. 
 
5. (Sbu) In addition to the CCT project, the Sub-Governor 
said the municipality provides food packages to about three 
thousand poor families.  About fourteen thousand families 
receive coal for home heating. (The prevalence of soft coal 
for home heating, long a major cause of air pollution in 
Ankara, causes a layer of black smog to be visible over the 
valley in which Altindag lies.)  According to the 
Sub-Governor, social problems such as criminality, 
prostitution, drug use and alcoholism are rife among 
Altindag,s poor, a comment reiterated by parents and 
teachers and the primary school we visited.  When asked 
whether Turkey,s economic recovery is beginning to be felt 
in Altindag, the Sub-Governor said he had yet to see signs of 
this, though he admitted Altindag,s situation might not be 
representative.  He pointed out that, unlike other sections 
of Ankara, Altindag has little industry, except for one 
furniture-making district.  Anecdotally, he was aware of 
cases in which applicants for social welfare assistance say 
that they used to have businesses but were bankrupted in the 
2001 crisis. 
 
Project,s Popularity Leads to Processing Backlogs: 
--------------------------------------------- --------- 
 
6. (Sbu) The Sub-Governor seemed genuinely enthusiastic about 
the project, viewing it as an important pillar of his 
municipality,s efforts to help its poorest citizens.  Some 
5,500 families have applied for the CCT project assistance in 
Altindag. So far only 2,250 have qualified but this number is 
likely to increase once the Social Solidarity Fund works 
through a backlog of unprocessed applications.  Indeed, 
everyone we met*from the Social Solidarity Fund officials 
who manage the project to the Sub-Governor to the school 
principals to parents*were unanimous that the CCT project,s 
biggest problem is working through this backlog.   The 
project,s nationwide statistics also show large disparities 
between the number of applicants and the number of 
beneficiaries, which the Social Solidarity Fund attributes to 
the processing backlogs.  The project is a victim of its own 
success: as its publicity campaign took off*the project,s 
posters were prominently displayed at the municipal 
building*poor families couldn,t get onto its rolls fast 
enough.  The Sub-Governor told us the municipality has begun 
having night shifts for the clerical workers who input the 
data to the handful of computers the municipality has for 
this purpose.  He brought us to the cramped office where 
university students, employed for this purpose, were 
receiving applicants and processing applications. 
 
7. (Sbu) Yadigar Gokalp, the US-educated director of the 
Social Solidarity Fund who accompanied us, is so keen to find 
ways to process applications faster that she asked the 
principal of the vocational school we visited if they could 
work out an arrangement for the students to input application 
data on the school,s computers, both to earn money and as a 
computer-training project.  The World Bank official 
responsible for CCT told econoff the backlog problem is 
likely to taper off as the processors work through the 
initial flood of applicants.  Moreover, the labor-intensive 
monitoring process, whereby the local charitable foundation 
staff go to the homes of applicants, will transition to 
sampling, rather than 100 percent monitoring.  He said the 
project has found only minimal application fraud, 
particularly in rural areas, which would justify a lower 
percentage sampling in the countryside than in cities. 
 
Yenidogan  Primary School: 
------------------------- 
8. (Sbu) The highlight of the afternoon was the visit to 
Yenidogan primary school, where econoffs were literally 
mobbed by hundreds of students in the small, paved courtyard 
of the school*the only play area.  The building was rundown 
and overcrowded.  The school is one of 76 primary schools in 
the municipality that have a total enrollment of 61,101 
pupils, taught by 2,428 teachers.  Whereas at the primary 
school level the gender breakdown is 51-49 (boy-girl), at the 
high school level the proportion of girl pupils falls to less 
than 46 percent.  One of the key goals of the project is to 
increase continuation rates for girls by making higher cash 
payments to families whose girls stay in school, with the 
highest payments reserved for families with high school-level 
girl students. 
 
9. (Sbu) The principal of the primary school told us there 
were only thirteen classrooms and forty-eight teachers for a 
school with 1700 pupils.  He said there are often over fifty 
children in a classroom.  The Social Solidarity Fund 
officials told us that the families of most of the students 
at the school*1600 out of 1700*had applied for the CCT 
benefits.   The principal, teachers and parents from the 
parents, association, all provided anecdotes about how the 
project helped local poor families.  They said there were 
many examples of kids staying in school because of the 
payments. Asked whether the payments helped women, since the 
payments go to the mothers unless there is no mother in the 
household, the parents were confident that they helped poor 
mothers feel more financially secure and less dependent on 
their husbands for money.  One teacher said he could see the 
difference: kids are more likely to get clothes and shoes and 
parents are paying off debts. 
 
10. (Sbu) The evident poverty of the neighborhood and 
decrepitude of the school may be why the Sub-Governor 
particularly wanted us to see it (and other Altindag 
elementary schools may not be as bad*we saw one from the 
outside that looked in much better condition).  Social 
Solidarity Fund officials told us that school staff*not 
janitors*had to clean the school due to lack of funds. 
Gokalp told us that in addition to the processing backlog 
problem, the biggest problem she runs into is schools crying 
out for funding for improved facilities, more teachers, etc. 
Of course, these are outside the scope of the project. 
Girls Vocational School Looked Better: 
-------------------------------------- 
11. (Sbu) After the primary school, econoffs visited Yildirim 
Beyazit Girls, Vocational high school.  Compared to the 
primary school, this school seemed in far better shape, 
though certainly far from being modern or well-equipped.  We 
spoke with two girls whose families are recipients of CCT 
funds, one of whose father is a market-seller and the other 
who is fatherless.  Both came from large families: one had 5 
siblings and the other 6.  At the primary school, though the 
parents on the parents, committee all had only 2 or 3 
children, they said many of the other families had 5 or 6 
kids.  Note: Turkey,s  population growth and fertility rates 
have fallen dramatically over the past generation.  According 
to a Turkish population expert who has consulted for USAID, 
over the past decade the population growth rate has fallen 
from 2.8% to 1.5% and the fertility rate from 3.5% to 2.3%. 
Not surprisingly, birth rates are higher in poor 
neighborhoods like Altindag.  End Note. 
12. (Sbu) The girls school had a small library (though the 
books looked old), and two rooms for computer training (the 
computers also looked old).  The students were in the midst 
of an election campaign for student government, and the walls 
were plastered with posters bearing campaign slogans. 
 
Comment: 
-------- 
 
13. (Sbu) Though the World Bank and IMF have endeavored to 
preserve social sector spending in a context of fiscal 
austerity, clearly Turkey,s schools have suffered from 
population growth surpassing budget growth.  What we saw in 
Altindag, if it is representative, suggests that the CCT 
project is playing a useful role in helping Turkey,s 
poorest, and empowering women and girls.  The $9 million U.S. 
grant advances U.S. objectives in Turkey, by providing direct 
assistance to the poorest people in the country. Post intends 
to publicize the U.S. role as much as possible, to help 
counter many ordinary Turks' perception of the U.S. as 
focused on the geostrategic dimension of bilateral ties or 
linked to IMF-mandated austerity.  At the same time, our 
visit to Altindag served as a reminder of the significant 
development challenges Turkey faces, even in a district only 
a few miles from Parliament, the very district in which the 
republic was founded. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
EDELMAN