Ambassadors Series

As the labour market changes, there is a need to adapt the social protection systems and avoid that larger parts of the workforce are left without enough access to social protection. This blog will discuss a recent recommendation of the Council of the EU which addresses these issues. The social protection systems in the EU are very diverse and differ in many aspects, such as the degree of coverage of risks in the population and the size and allocation of the budget. By international standards, the EU member states have very high levels of social protection (European Commission, 2018b). Nevertheless, only a few of them have undertaken reforms to adapt their social protection systems in accordance with the changing needs of the workforce and the improvements have been uneven across...Read more

Over time, the concept of citizenship has evolved, broadening its spectrum from the notion of legal status to include political and social membership and the redistribution of resources. For Turner (1993) citizenship can be analysed through the acceptance of a “set of practices (judicial, political, economic, and cultural) which defines a person as a competent member of a society, and which as a consequence shapes the flow of resources to persons and social groups”. Embracing this rational approach, the notion of economic redistribution in citizenship single-handedly tilts the mind’s trajectory toward a possible conception of social protection. In fact, one may suggest that we are able to see a “natural convergence” between both concepts (Plagerson 2012) since both have universalistic...Read more

Introduction In the past decade, birth registration (BR) has come under the limelight as one of UNICEF’s four pillars of children’s rights programming and a target of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. [i] BR is officially defined by UNICEF (2005) as the “ the continuous, permanent and official recording of a child’s existence through an administrative process of the state and coordinated by a particular branch of government”. BR is a fundamental human right and an essential means of protecting a child’s right to an identity (UNICEF, 2005), besides being instrumental to ensure access to basic services and social protection benefits. In Nigeria, the registration of births is part of an effective Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system, which...Read more

When perceiving a situation as risky, one would always seek ways to reduce the risks. This does not only apply to individuals, but it can also be observed in groups, communities, and even countries. Social protection has been defined in many different ways, but most definitions agree on one thing: social protection is aimed at reducing poverty and people’s exposure and vulnerability to risks. Social protection includes programmes and policies focused on reducing poverty and risk exposure among the poor and vulnerable, who comprise more than 50% of the population in low-and-middle-income-countries (LMICs).1 LMICs have only just begun to take small steps towards effective and comprehensive social protection systems. However, these steps have been hampered by several bottlenecks, such as...Read more