Sustaining Existing Social Protection Programmes During Crises: What Do We Know? How Can We Know More?

Abstract

Research on social assistance in crisis situations has focused predominantly on how social assistance can flex in response to rapid-onset emergencies such as floods or hurricanes and to slower-onset shocks such as drought. This paper identifies a substantial knowledge gap – namely, our understanding of the ways in which existing, government-led programmes can be sustained during crises to ensure that households that were already poor and vulnerable before a crisis continue to be supported. The limited literature available focuses on climate- and natural environment-related shocks – far less attention is paid to other crises. Conflict-affected situations are a major gap, although there is an emerging body of evidence of the ways in which focus on adapting delivery mechanisms has allowed social assistance and other social protection programmes to be sustained throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper concludes that a better understanding of when, where and how existing programmes can be sustained during situations of violent conflict will help to ensure that poor and vulnerable households can be supported – either through government programmes or by enabling robust diagnosis of when efforts to sustaining existing programmes will be inadequate and an additional, external responses are required.

Social Protection in Nigeria: Analysing Capacities

“…There is much less evidence and less apparent focus on support to enable applying and maintaining capacities that are built. {Footnote 2: For examples from other countries, see Slater (2022) and Slater et al (2022).} This paper makes the argument that in Nigeria very little focus is on capacity initiatives for maintaining capacity and this is common with the little evidence from other countries that are facing these questions (Box 1.1).…”

Researching Capacities to Sustain Social Protection in Protracted Crises. Part 2: Early Findings

“…At the heart of the Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research agenda is an attempt to plug a knowledge gap about existing social protection programmes. Our inception phase scoping work demonstrated that, in the midst of massive interest in shock-responsive social protection (Longhurst and Slater 2022), little attention is paid to what happens to existing social protection in situations of protracted crisis (Slater, Haruna and Baur 2022;Slater 2022). By placing substantial emphasis on how to flex and expand programmes vertically and horizontally, the shock-responsive social protection agenda has tended to take attention away from if and how existing programmes are able to sustain delivery to existing beneficiaries in situations of climate and/or conflict crisis.…”

What is Known About Capacity and Coordination of Social Assistance Programmes in Crisis Situations?

“…duplication, inconsistencies in transfer levels, gaps, exclusion and a lack of accountability, with deleterious impacts on recovery, peacebuilding and state-building, especially caused by raising people's expectations about social assistance provision and then failing to meet them. Fragmentation also limits economies of scale and efficiencies that could reduce operating costs, increase transfer coverage and levels, and contribute to overall programme sustainability in situations where instability is already a key limiting factor to the reliable, sustained delivery of programmes (Slater 2022). on cash, the use of MPGs, or where these sit within multi-sectoral response programming, especially where CWGs are not connected to the cluster system.…”