Social protection approaches to Covid-19

Engaged in a large international network, we provided ad-hoc expert advice on social protection approaches to Covid-19 to donor agencies and countries on how to pivot their social protection work amidst the pandemic.

Project team members

SPACE is a virtual expert helpdesk on Social Protection Approaches to Covid-19. It aims to support partner country governments as well as internationally supported social protection programmes in adapting to the increased needs arising due to the Covid-19 crisis. The helpdesk was jointly set-up by the FCDO, GIZ, and DFAT in April 2020.

Challenges

During the crisis, many governments and country programmes needed quick advice on how to pivot their social protection programming to adapt to the crisis and changing conditions. This needed ad hoc technical assistance provided by senior social protection experts with specific expertise on adaptive social protection, including shock-responsive social protection, economic inclusion, economic recovery post Covid-19, management information systems, employment and social insurance, climate resilience, disaster risk management and disaster risk financing as well as social protection and decentralisation.

Our approach

The advisory service provided through SPACE took place virtually in form of one or more advisory calls, analytical pieces or a combination of both. Further to that SPACE developed and conducted learning sessions on topics that are relevant across countries.

Outcomes

SPACE has provided advice to over 30 countries. SPACE has also developed technical analytical framework documents on different sub-topics that serve the global social protection community and are increasingly being used by other development and humanitarian organisations. While most of the advisory work was provided in the form of discussions with and recommendations to the clients, some of the SPACE work took place on a more broader level and treated thematic areas, such as the consequences of the pandemic on social protection and migration work for example.

Some of this broader work was published on socialprotection.org (see here) and on reliefweb (see here). OPM SPACE experts have contributed to work on economic inclusion, management information systems, employment and social insurance, climate resilience, disaster risk management and disaster risk financing, migration, as well as social protection and decentralisation especially on requests from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

We would like to thank Maham Farhat, Valentina Barca, Rodolfo Beazley, and Cecilia Costella for their work throughout the project.

Area of expertise