Social protection is a broad concept describing all interventions from public, private and voluntary organisations and social networks, to support communities, households and individuals in their efforts to prevent, manage and overcome vulnerability.

The most popular component of social protection known as ‘social transfers’, are transfers in cash or kind to poor households. Other social protection interventions can be such as fee waivers for education and healthcare, input subsidies in agriculture, and pro-poor labour laws. Generally, Social protection aims to create a nationally accepted minimum standard of living under which no one should fall.

What Can Social Protection Do?

• Secure incomes and consumption, largely through cash or in-kind transfers such as child allowances and old age pensions, cash or food for work programmes, and food subsidies;

• Enhance human development, mainly via measures to ensure access to basic services (e.g. fee waivers and exemptions and subsidised health insurance), and nutritional supplements and fortification

• Promote productive livelihoods, through direct support to agriculture, such as starter packs or crop insurance, asset transfers (e.g. restocking of livestock), or micro finance;

• Transform relations and institutions, by helping to strengthen the social contract, and empowering communities and states to protect and uphold human rights to their acceptable level of decent living through interventions such as decent work legislation, micro finance schemes, and advocacy for social inclusion for marginalized groups (e.g., women, children, indigenous people, disabled people).

Social protection

is a powerful and affordable strategy in development policy that is effective in reducing poverty and inequalities while promoting economic growth.

Advocacy for Social Protection