What can data tell us about international commitment to providing access to disability benefits?
03/12/2019
Written by Patrick Llewellin, Diloá Athias, and Bjorn Gelders In recognition of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Development Pathways is launching the 2019 edition of our Disability Benefit Database – a unique inventory of tax-financed disability benefits in low- and middle-income countries around the world. Persons with disabilities – and their households – face a higher risk of living in poverty than people without disabilities. Even when incomes are similar, people with disabilities tend to...
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Double Jeopardy: How Poverty Targeting Mechanisms Unfairly Impact on Families with a Disabled Member
Our guest blogger Ilene Zeitzer, is President of Disability Policy Solutions. An internationally recognised expert on comparative disability policy, Ms. Zeitzer has worked in more than 65 countries on various disability-related issues. In social protection policy, there is probably no better example of the unintentional consequences of well-intentioned policies than poverty...
02/12/2019
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Can you picture the right to social security?
By Alexandra Barrantes (Development Pathways), and Anna Bulman and Ria Singh Sawhney (Picture Human Rights) Development Pathways and Picture Human Rights have collaborated on a new mini-series on the human right to social security that seeks to demonstrate, through illustration, the importance of framing social protection debates and policy...
26/11/2019
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The World Bank’s new White Paper falls short on its objective of ‘protecting all’
The World Bank recently issued a White Paper on rethinking social protection systems to extend coverage. While at first glance this is an honourable goal, the proposals in Protecting All: Risk-Sharing for a Diverse and Diversifying World of Work would do little to achieve this aim. The paper proposes a rollback of...
22/10/2019
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The golden rule, applied to social protection
Alexandra Barrantes One of my favourite books to read out loud to my children at bedtime is The Golden Rule. It lays out, in very simple terms, the ideal that we should all “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. But as this is not a...
10/10/2019
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A much-loved English bear points to cash programming that has more impact
Cash transfers are widely recognised as an important tool for tackling poverty and fostering human development outcomes. The operational challenge is to ensure that the right people are paid the right amount of money, regularly and reliably. In this article, guest blogger Charlie Goldsmith argues that schools can offer a...
25/09/2019
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“They sleep like goats and no-one cares”: The role of social protection in promoting dignity for people who experience disability
Helen Barrett He sleeps like a goat on the floor because she cannot afford for him to soil yet another mattress, she tells me. He is excluded from a nutrition programme, despite being malnourished, told by officials that this is part of his disability. She cannot leave him alone, and...
11/09/2019
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Valor Criança: Angola starts to lay the first building block of an inclusive social protection system
Alexandra Barrantes It is widely recognised that if countries wish to successfully address poverty, enhance human development, augment people’s capacity to engage in the labour market, enhance a national social contract conducive to greater social cohesion and generate sustainable economic growth, it is necessary to build inclusive national social protection...
22/08/2019
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Fake news: World Bank accuses Kenya’s old age pension of benefitting the rich!
Stephen Kidd We probably all know the story of the scorpion that was given a lift across a river by a frog. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog, condemning them both to death by drowning. As she was dying, the frog asked the scorpion why he’d done it and...
09/08/2019
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Social security innovation: is it always the right thing to do?
Matthew Greenslade In the world of international development, why are we all so obsessed by innovation? At the right time, social security innovation is important, vital even, but why is there a bias among donors towards the new? This bias can sound progressive, but it often comes at a cost,...
18/06/2019
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