August 2016 Newsletter: Social Protection and Employment
This month’s newsletter is dedicated to Social Protection and Employment in light of there being an increased focus on the contribution of social protection programmes to improving livelihoods by assisting poor and vulnerable people access jobs in the formal and informal sectors. This has led to the implementation of a range of employment programmes, including cash for work, food for work, labour market programmes, training and public works programmes. These programmes offer short to long-term employment opportunities, impacting local economies by generating a demand for labour, goods and services. Many new and innovative approaches are emerging and being incorporated into existing social protection programmes. This newsletter highlights these advances and offers opportunities for moving the agenda forward.
More, and More Productive, Jobs for Nigeria, by the World Bank Group, provides an overview of jobs, workers, and employment opportunities in Nigeria, using recent household data. It evidences how Nigeria’s status as a middle-income country and Africa’s largest economic power contrasts with its high poverty levels, largely due to the main sectors of economic growth being disconnected from the sectors that provide employment. Therefore, both new and existing jobs—whether in agriculture or other sectors—will need to be more productive to help the population move out of low-earning employment and poverty.
The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth’s (IPC-IG) One Pager, Social protection through work in lower-income countries: an assessment framework, demonstrates how extending social protection to the rural population in lower-income countries is a global priority, with both workfare and welfare playing significant roles. Although workfare schemes are costlier, they are often put forward as a favoured option for supporting the rural working poor.
Check out this BRAC publication, Labor Markets and Poverty in Village Economies, which explores how women’s choices over labour activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty.
Announcing the launch of the Social Protection for Employment – Community (SPEC)! The Community is borne out of the South-South Knowledge Exchange Forum: Linking Social Protection to Employment Opportunities event, which took place from 24-25 May 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Indonesia’s National Team for Accelerating Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) jointly hosted the event with support from the German Development Cooperation GIZ programme ‘Global Alliance for Social Protection’. The key outcome of the forum was a Guidance Note on linking social protection to employment.
The Online Community is supported by DFAT and GIZ. It will host a series of webinars dedicated to country experiences on linking social protection to employment. Please refer to the Community’s Charter, created by its Core Team from the Jakarta event, which provides guidance and direction on how the Community functions.
Thank you to the webinar's panelists, Michael Hanni (Associate Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Economic Comission for Latin America—ECLAC) and Rodrigo Octávio Orair (Researcher at Brazil’s Institute for Applied Economic Research—IPEA and Research Associate at the IPC-IG).
socialprotection.org featured as one of the partners of the Asia-Pacific Social Protection Week (APSP 2016) in Manila, Philippines, which took place during 1-5 August. The week-long event was dedicated to discussing recent issues affecting social protection in developing economies. Issues associated with aging populations, affording social protection to informal workers, generating political will, financing social protection, disaster risk management and data management were addressed.
On 10-21 October 2016 the International Labour Organization (ILO) will host the course: Employment injury schemes and the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases at the International Training Centre of the ILO (ITC-ILO) in Turin, Italy. The course is aimed at decision-makers of ministries and institutions in charge of social security. The deadline for application is 11 September 2016.
09:05-09:25 Presentation
Kenya’s experience in scaling up the Hunger Safety Net Programme in drought emergencies Catherine Fitzgibbon (Consultant on design of HSNP scale-up mechanism)
09:25-09:45 Presentation
Shock responsive social protection in Mozambique: Challenging the paradigm? Sarah Bailey (Research Associate, Overseas Development Institute, and team member of Mozambique study, Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems research)
09:45-10:30 AudienceQ&A
Watch this lecture, Social organisation of care: Insights from the global South, organised by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), featuring speaker Deepta Chopra (PhD, Research Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies). It provides an overview of how care work is organised within low income households, and where the main issues lie in terms of overburden of care work.
This United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), UN Women and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) learning tool, Making Social Policy Work for Women showcases a panel that took place during the research-advocacy-policy workshop, Substantive Equality for Women: Connecting Human Rights and Public Policy on 15 June 2015. It highlights the move towards integrating gender equality considerations more strongly into work on economic and social rights, ensuring that issues like employment, macroeconomic policy and social protection are given greater prominence in work on women’s rights.
Check out this article, Asia-Pacific needs to boost social protection investment to achieve SDGs by Bart Edes (Director for Social Development, Governance and Gender Division, Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department, Asian Development Bank—ADB) noting the inclusion of employment in the SDG agenda of “achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all”.
This month's featured socialprotection.org Ambassador is João Antonio Lima. João holds a Masters in Political Science and a BA in International Relations. He currently works as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), for the project "Brazilian Cooperation for International Development". He is also a Voluntary Writer for the CEIRI Newspaper.
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