Jordan Takaful poverty targeting algorithm excludes vulnerable families
The Jordanian government's Takaful program used an algorithm to rank social protection applicants, which unfairly excluded poor families. The system relied on 57 socioeconomic indicators that failed to capture the complex realities of poverty.
The economic pressures that people endure and the ways they struggle to get by are frequently invisible to the algorithm.
Key facts
- What
- The Jordanian government's Takaful program used an algorithm to rank social protection applicants, which unfairly excluded poor families.
- Incident date
- Jan 1, 2022
- Who
- National Aid Fund (Jordan)
- Failure mode
- Brand & Safety Incident
- AI surface
- Agentic Workflow
- Severity
- High
What happened
The Takaful program, funded by the World Bank, implemented an algorithmic system to allocate limited cash transfers to the poorest Jordanians. Human Rights Watch found that the system's opaque criteria and rigid indicators led to the exclusion of eligible families in need. This resulted in vulnerable households losing essential financial support.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user prompts the model in public view.
- 02 · Model stepThe model produces unsafe or off-brand output.
- 03 · Control gapNo filter holds the line before publish.
- 04 · FailureThe output goes public unchecked.
- 05 · ConsequenceA reputational or safety incident lands.
A contained signal crosses into output that goes public.
The algorithm used a weighted system of 57 socioeconomic indicators, including car ownership and utility consumption, to rank applicants. It failed by applying rigid thresholds, such as automatic exclusion for owning a car less than five years old, and flawed assumptions that higher utility usage indicated lower vulnerability.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/jordan-takaful-poverty-targeting-algorithm-excludesAI Failure Index. "Jordan Takaful poverty targeting algorithm excludes vulnerable families" (FI-0544). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/jordan-takaful-poverty-targeting-algorithm-excludes (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0544. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
Realm watches the model's internal state for the signature of unsafe or off-brand generation and can block or reroute the output before it becomes public, in real time rather than after it has been screenshotted.