A progressive moment: Social protection’s rationale identified as citizenship, not charity at IMF/LSE event
Matthew Greenslade The London School of Economics is where the welfare state was invented. Social protection is now needed more than ever, everywhere, to address rising challenges of high inequality and political upheaval. A new social contract is needed, in all countries. Higher income countries have designed their welfare states,...
Out of reach: targeting fails to keep pace with household dynamics
Can poverty-targeting work effectively if it assumes fast-changing households are static? Nicola Ansell discusses research which underscores the challenges to the selection mechanisms ahead of a forthcoming global review of the evidence. Nicola Ansell What is a household? Around the world, policymakers frequently confront this seemingly simple concept, only to find...
Uganda’s Senior Citizens Grant: Evaluation reveals further evidence on its impacts
Stephen Kidd A mark of a decent society is a guarantee that all citizens can enjoy income security once they reach old age. At least 56 countries worldwide now provide pensions to more than 90 per cent of older people and a growing number of low- and middle-income countries are...
All work and no pay: The invisibilisation of women’s labour in public works programmes
Anasuya Sengupta On International Women’s Day, I want to bring attention to a silent scandal on the use of women’s labour within public works programmes, which are increasingly referred to as productive safety net programmes in many low-income countries. These are, as many of you know, good old-fashioned workfare schemes...
How social protection recipients can raise their voice – with SMS messages
How can social protection communications ensure recipients understand their entitlements and hold social protection officials to account? Even in humanitarian contexts, in remote, sparsely-populated regions with low technology-penetration rates? This is the question that our Management Information Systems team in our Kenya office has been putting expertise into answering. It...
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...
“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...
Strengthening Rwanda’s social protection system
To strengthen Rwanda's social protection system, we supported the development of a National Social Protection Policy and Strategy.
Upgrading a social assistance MIS and linking social protection programmes with a Single Registry
Uganda’s social protection sector is characterised by a large number of fragmented and uncoordinated interventions with a wide variety of different management information systems (MISs). There was a need to...
Improving social protection coverage and effectiveness in Malawi
We designed, developed, tested and deployed a national platform to enter, store, access and share household data for social protection programmes in Malawi.