Scaling up and sustaining social protection under COVID-19

Scaling up and sustaining social protection under COVID-19
Author: Fang, Peixun
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 4
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

The COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns have had enormous negative economic impacts and tested the resilience of people across all income levels. However, as with most crises, the poor disproportionately face the largest challenge in coping with economic shocks given their low asset base, lack of savings, and the informality of their employment. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 140 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by the crisis, threatening gains made in the fight against poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition in the last decade (Laborde, Martin, and Vos 2020). Social safety net policies have expanded considerably during the pandemic, helping to prevent vulnerable populations from falling further into poverty and supporting households’ recovery following the pandemic. This brief summarizes some of the patterns that have emerged, using data from the COVID-19 Policy Response (CPR) Portal to better identify how governments are targeting their efforts, which groups they are prioritizing, and whether citizens are satisfied with these interventions.

COVID-19 and Social Protection

COVID-19 and Social Protection
Author: Steven Ratuva
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2022-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 981162948X

This book provides a comparative analysis of how communities have developed people-based resilience in response to the global impact of COVID-19. The crisis of the capitalist economy due to border closure, downturn in business, loss of jobs and large-scale destruction of people’s well-being has worsened poverty, and inequality worsened the situation of the already marginalized. At the same time, it has provided the opportunity for indigenous and marginalized communities to innovatively strengthen their social and solidarity economies to respond the unprecedented calamity in a self-empowering and sustainable way. The book explores some of the ways in which local communities have mobilized their cultural resources to strengthen their social solidarity and mitigating mechanisms against the continuing global calamity. It looks at how different communities approach social protection as a way of sustaining their well-being outside the parameters of the ailing market economy and how some of these can provide valuable lessons for strengthening resilience for the future.

The Role of Digital in the COVID-19 Social Assistance Response

The Role of Digital in the COVID-19 Social Assistance Response
Author: World Bank
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in vast numbers of people in need of social assistance, many of whom were not previously covered by social safety nets. To meet this unprecedented level of need, governments quickly scaled social assistance reaching over 1.7 billion people in low- and middle income countries. Scaling up social assistance presented two separate but related challenges: first, adapting targeting and registration to reach individuals not commonly included in social assistance databases, such as urban informal workers, and second, how to deliver government to person (G2P) payments safely and securely in the context of the pandemic. Countries that could leverage pre-pandemic investments in digital public infrastructure (DPI) - identification (ID), payments and trusted data sharing - were better able to implement COVID-response social assistance programs and reach more beneficiaries. This paper, analyzes the role of these DPIs, also called digital stack, in the social protection response to COVID by analyzing data on howCOVID-response social assistance programs register red and made payments to beneficiaries across178 programs across 85 countries. The analysis shows how these digital systems and infrastructure allowed for innovative targeting, registration, and payment approaches that covered a significantportion of the population. This paper uses administrative data on G2P registration and payment methods combined with anecdotal evidence from country case studies to show how pre-pandemic investments in digital databases, digital ID, and digital payments impacted countries' abilities to reach new beneficiaries and deliver payments safely in the context of the pandemic response. It further details workaround solutions implemented by countries without these assets and infrastructure in place, and how some countries were able to expand their digital infrastructure even amidst the urgency of the crisis response. The analysis concludes with suggestions as to the impact that the social assistance response to COVID-19 can have on the future of social protection payments, in terms of inspiring investments in building and strengthening G2P ecosystems globally.

Adaptive Social Protection

Adaptive Social Protection
Author: Thomas Bowen
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1464815755

Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these households, ASP supports their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to the shocks they face—before, during, and after these shocks occur. Over the long term, by supporting these three capacities, ASP can provide a pathway to a more resilient state for households that may otherwise lack the resources to move out of chronically vulnerable situations. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks outlines an organizing framework for the design and implementation of ASP, providing insights into the ways in which social protection systems can be made more capable of building household resilience. By way of its four building blocks—programs, information, finance, and institutional arrangements and partnerships—the framework highlights both the elements of existing social protection systems that are the cornerstones for building household resilience, as well as the additional investments that are central to enhancing their ability to generate these outcomes. In this report, the ASP framework and its building blocks have been elaborated primarily in relation to natural disasters and associated climate change. Nevertheless, many of the priorities identified within each building block are also pertinent to the design and implementation of ASP across other types of shocks, providing a foundation for a structured approach to the advancement of this rapidly evolving and complex agenda.

Social protection as a pathway to sustaining peace

Social protection as a pathway to sustaining peace
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2024-01-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9251385041

Global crises are becoming the new normal. From climate change to the contemporary food price crisis, vulnerable populations – and especially rural people – are facing increasingly difficult odds of flourishing. Such challenges are even more pronounced where there is conflict, whose multidimensional nature demands to direct more attention to its drivers and impacts. Over the past decades, social protection has contributed to development outcomes, such as those related to poverty reduction, food and nutrition security, and gender equality. Besides, social protection systems have proven to be effective also in addressing covariate shocks, as exemplified by the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. There has instead been limited operational research regarding social protection’s contributions to peace. In order to start addressing this gap, this paper discusses how social protection can sustain peace efforts by understanding peace not as an outcome but, rather, as an ongoing process. The paper argues that the contributions that social protection can make to peace can be divided between two overlapping scenarios: “working in conflict” and “working on conflict”. While the former refers to efforts aimed at offsetting the impacts of conflict, the latter relates to interventions that intend to deliberately address its underlying drivers. The working paper also recognizes that social protection interventions in a conflict-affected context can potentially be harmful and fuel social tensions in the absence of adequate consideration of local power dynamics. It therefore calls for social protection strategies and programmes to be conflict-sensitive – beyond the “do no harm” – to make explicit contributions to peace.

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309493439

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.

Exploring Universal Basic Income

Exploring Universal Basic Income
Author: Ugo Gentilini
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1464815119

Universal basic income (UBI) is emerging as one of the most hotly debated issues in development and social protection policy. But what are the features of UBI? What is it meant to achieve? How do we know, and what don’t we know, about its performance? What does it take to implement it in practice? Drawing from global evidence, literature, and survey data, this volume provides a framework to elucidate issues and trade-offs in UBI with a view to help inform choices around its appropriateness and feasibility in different contexts. Specifically, the book examines how UBI differs from or complements other social assistance programs in terms of objectives, coverage, incidence, adequacy, incentives, effects on poverty and inequality, financing, political economy, and implementation. It also reviews past and current country experiences, surveys the full range of existing policy proposals, provides original results from micro†“tax benefit simulations, and sets out a range of considerations around the analytics and practice of UBI.

Inequalities, Youth, Democracy and the Pandemic

Inequalities, Youth, Democracy and the Pandemic
Author: Simone Maddanu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040002943

This book brings together studies from various locations to examine the growing social problems that have been brought to the fore by the COVID-19 outbreak. Employing both qualitative, theoretical and quantitative methods, it presents the impact of the pandemic in different settings, shedding light on political and cultural realities around the world. With attention to inequalities rooted in race and ethnicity, economic conditions, gender, disability, and age, it considers different forms of marginalization and examines the ongoing disjunctions that increasingly characterize contemporary democracies from a multilevel perspective. The book addresses original analyses and approaches from a global perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic, its governance, and its effects in different geographies. These analyses are organized around three main axes: 1) how COVID-19 pandemic worsened social, racial/ethnic, and economic inequalities, including variables such as migration status, gender, and disability; 2) how the pandemic impacted youth and how younger generations cope with public health alarms, and containment measures; 3) how the pandemic posed a challenge to democracy, reshaped the political agenda, and the debate in the public sphere. Contributions from around the world show how local and national issues may overlap on a global scale, laying the foundation for connected sociologies. Based on qualitative as well as quantitative empirical analysis on various categories of individuals and groups, this edited volume reflects on the sociological aspects of current planetary crises which will continue to be at the core of our societies. A wide-ranging, international volume that focuses on both unexpected social changes and new forms of agency in response to a period of crisis, Inequalities, Youth, Democracy and the Pandemic will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of health, social problems and inequalities.

The Long Shadow of Informality

The Long Shadow of Informality
Author: Franziska Ohnsorge
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2022-02-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464817545

A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging market and developing economies. This may hold back the recovery in these economies from the deep recessions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic--unless governments adopt a broad set of policies to address the challenges of widespread informality. This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of informality and its implications for a durable economic recovery and for long-term development. It finds that pervasive informality is associated with significantly weaker economic outcomes--including lower government resources to combat recessions, lower per capita incomes, greater poverty, less financial development, and weaker investment and productivity.