From Undeserving Poor to Rights Holder: Working Paper
In our first working paper, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, discusses the importance of having a human rights approach to social protection....
The impact of increased migration on the politics of social protection under spotlight
29th November: The politics of social protection and how this is affected by increased migration will be under the spotlight at a University of Cambridge event. The Politics of Social...
Launch of Lesotho’s National Social Protection Strategy
In our latest Pathways Perspectives edition, Launch of Lesotho’s National Social Protection Strategy, our contributors Bazlul Khondker and Nicholas Freeland explore the practical achievements of the strategy development process. They also...
Universal social protection: the ILO attempt, once more, to persuade the World Bank to commit to inclusivity and the right to social security for all
On Wednesday 21st September 2016, we heard the apparently joyous news that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Bank had launched the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection which “aims to make pensions, maternity, disability and child benefits, among others, available to all persons.” Does this send hope to...
Poverty-reduction failures of targeting social protection to be highlighted at social studies seminar
Development Pathways’ Senior Social Policy Specialist Stephen Kidd is set to present evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to targeting in social protection at a seminar in The Hague....
The argument for impactful, sustainable social protection laid out in The Hague
So-called ‘pro-poor’ social protection programmes lead to fewer of the poorest being covered, and beneficiaries receiving lower transfer values, a seminar in The Hague has heard. Development Pathways’ Senior Social...
Cash transfer design can strengthen or weaken social relationships, universities find
A university research project to identify the impact of cash transfers on social relationships has uncovered that cash transfers are viewed as invaluable for poverty reduction by recipients – but...
Poxy Means Testing
PMT is a curse! Sisters, you all know that: inescapable, debilitating, emotionally draining, a regular cause of extreme irritability! But I refer here not to Pre-Menstrual Tension, but rather to a new form of PMT that is sweeping the globe: Proxy Means Testing. This variant of Proxy Means Testing, PMT,...
Poxy Means Testing: it’s Official!
(“A prox on both your houses”)[i] The World Bank has recently – and some would say belatedly – undertaken a critical review of the Proxy Means Test (PMT)[ii], the approach to targeting that it has been advocating, uncritically, for the past decade. The results are astonishing. Disguised beneath a splendidly...
Rationing, not targeting
“Will no-one rid me of this troublesome PMT?” [i] Anyone who has worked in social protection knows that the thorniest issue of all is that of “targeting”. The recent polemics on these pages about the inadequacy of the Proxy Means Test (PMT) as a “targeting” mechanism (including my last blog post: Poxy...