Working Paper
Policy transparency in the public sector
A well functioning system of public service delivery requires the definition and measurement of eligibility for services to be determined in a transparent and non-discretionary manner. This paper uses the case of the Productive Social Safety Net in...
Working Paper
The negotiated politics of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa
Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The...
Working Paper
Social protection for working-age women in Tanzania
Tanzania has expanded its social protection framework significantly over the past decade, but the country continues to grapple with important gender inequalities. This paper examines, first, the evolution and effects of Tanzania’s social protection...
Working Paper
Social distress and (some) relief
Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates...
Working Paper
Impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and aid packages
In view of the detrimental effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on household welfare, most countries implemented economic stimulus aid packages to support households. The extent to which these packages mitigated the pandemic’s adverse effects on households...
Blog
How Africa can fight the pandemic
by
Arkebe Oqubay
April 2020
The response to Africa’s COVID-19 plight must be swift and at scale rather than too little, too late. In a world short of progressive global...
Blog
Social protection at a crossroad
by
Annalena Oppel
August 2021
How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with...
Working Paper
Welfare and redistributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological...
Blog
The case for universal social insurance in Latin America
by
Santiago Levy
November 2019
Access to effective social insurance in Latin America is typically determined by workers’ status in the labor market – whether they have formal or...
Book
The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The notion that social protection should be a key strategy for reducing poverty in developing countries has now been mainstreamed within international development policy and practice. Promoted as an integral dimension of the post-Washington Consensus...
Policy Brief
The politics of social protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Since the mid-1990s, there has been in Africa something of a ‘quiet revolution’ in poverty reduction strategies with the proliferation of social assistance programmes that entail cash transfers to the poor. The past two decades have also been...