May 3, 2023
Guest post by Babken Babajanian The current global crisis, with soaring prices for food and fuel, has been devastating for many people around the world. But for older people in poor countries with no access to pensions or social protection, it is particularly bleak. And worse still for older women. Sadly, although they are bearing the brunt of the crisis,
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Social protection and COVID-19 – the emerging story of what worked where… and what it all means for future crises
September 29, 2021
Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often
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Has Covid been a tipping point for Universal Social Protection? Here’s what we know
January 7, 2021
Crises act as tipping points. Local crises and conflicts can galvanize a social movement or discredit a leader in a given location. Global crises change far more than that – the 2008 financial crisis has been credited with everything from sparking the rise of right-wing populism (hopefully now heading for a historical dustbin near you) to transforming norms around inequality
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Social Protection in a Time of Covid – 4 takeaways and 4 big gaps from a recent global discussion
November 17, 2020
Larissa Pelham, Oxfam’s Social Protection Adviser, reports back on a 4 day Zoomathon Covid-19 has catapulted social protection into the spotlight. From furloughing to school feeding programmes delivered to homes, 212 states and territories across the world have planned or delivered 1179 social protection interventions in response to the pandemic. It is the backbone support to families and individuals to
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Making COVID Social Protection Accountable to India’s Vulnerable Citizens
August 26, 2020
Suchi Pande is a scholar in residence at the Accountability Research Center, Washington DC This post discusses two development policies that sound technical, but which are really important. Social protection is the set of services that help protect people against economic shocks or disasters, and from the ups-and-downs all people face in their life-cycle. Social audits are organized by citizens
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Why Informal Social Protection could be the missing piece in the Covid Response
May 22, 2020
As part of their Masters in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies, LSE students do a consultancy for aid agencies and others. Here Chiara Jachia, Natalie Schwarz, Hanna Toda and Anjuman Tanha discuss the Covid implications of their consultancy on Informal Social Protection. Oxfam’s Larissa Pelham (contact larissa.pelham[at]oxfam.org if you want to know more about its work) introduces their project: ‘Informal
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What if families & friends are the main source of Social Protection?
December 19, 2019
Most discussion about ‘social protection’ focusses on programmes run by aid donors or governments, but that misses out on an awful lot. Some of my LSE students are doing a project for Oxfam on ‘informal forms of social protection’ – what families and communities are doing to build their resilience against shocks (accidents, unemployment, crop failure etc) in countries like
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The Rise of Social Protection, the art of Paradigm Maintenance, and a disagreement with the World Bank
November 8, 2018
Spent a mind-stretching day last week with a bunch of social protection experts from the LSE, IMF and assorted other bodies. Social Protection includes emergency relief, permanent mechanisms such as pensions and cash transfers, and ‘social insurance’ based on people’s personal contributions. LSE boss Minouche Shafik set the scene really well: ‘The failure of safety nets is partly responsible for
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Precarious Lives: Food, Work and Care after the Global Food Crisis. Launch of new report, 9th September
August 31, 2016
Oxfam researcher John Magrath profiles a new joint Oxfam/IDS report and tries to convince you to come along to the launch in London on 9th September Duncan has written previously about one of the projects he was most proud of initiating while in (nominal!) charge of Oxfam’s Research Team. This started out as Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility’ and
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The Economist on the global spread of cash transfers and Jokowi’s flying start in Indonesia
January 13, 2015
Some fascinating coverage of the new Indonesian president and cash transfers in the Economist this week. First up, Indonesia: ‘Having trimmed petrol subsidies in November, Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, who is universally known as Jokowi, scrapped them entirely from January 1st. Small subsidies (1,000 rupiah, or eight cents, per litre) will remain in place for diesel, used for public transport
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How is India’s iconic NREGA social protection scheme doing? Interesting research from Tamil Nadu.
February 27, 2014
Some social programmes act as honey pots for busy bee researchers. A few years ago Brazil’s Bolsa Familia was the subject of choice, but it seems to have been overtaken by India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) which has researchers all over it. A Global Insights paper from the University of Sussex has some great insights into
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Now that’s what I call social protection: the Chile Solidario Programme
August 27, 2013
Another one of the fascinating case studies dug up by Sophie King for my recent UN paper on ‘The Role of the State in Empowering Poor and Excluded Groups and Individuals’. This one looks at how Chile manages its integrated social protection programme and is based on a paper by the excellent Stephanie Barrientos. Reading it really brings home the
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