The last two years have brought a huge challenge to social protection systems around the world as the pandemic hit and shed light to the need of strengthening social insurance policies to protect workers against shocks that affected their livelihoods. We look at the case of South Africa’s Unemployment Insurance Fund (or UIF) and Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (better known as TERS) to analyze how these policies were implemented to reach domestic workers, what went wrong, what went right, the challenges ahead and what learnings this might bring to help us think about new insurance schemes that can protect informal workers.