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. She argues that the persistent stigma around poverty among politicians, policy-makers and the general public has been a major obstacle to achieving the full potential of social protection to tackle poverty. A human rights approach can help to dismantle the fallacy of the  ‘undeserving poor’, moving towards a model in which people living in poverty are understood as individuals with inherent dignity and entitlements to social protection.