Social protection is a relatively new policy approach that aims to integrate concerns about social security and poverty reduction into a unified framework. To date, the social protection agenda has generally been presented in terms of categories of poor, excluded and vulnerable social groups, differentiated according to age, health status and relationship to formal labour markets. This emphasis on the formal sector has left out women in particular. Although some measures are targeted primarily at female-headed households, gender is rarely used as a differentiating lens through which to understand poor people‟s exposure to risk and vulnerability and to design social protection measures accordingly. At the same time, however, social protection programmes are rarely gender neutral, and poorly designed programme can exacerbate or contribute to inequalities.