Monday, October 30, 2023
India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is among the largest and most influential social programmes in the world, guaranteeing 100 days of paid work to 8% of the world’s population. The programme was designed as a vital lifeline to...
Monday, March 20, 2023
The World Bank, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) have announced an integrated new open-source software package to improve the management of social protection and...
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Mobile money has had a major impact in expanding access to and increasing utilization of financial services amongst women in Africa. The uptake of mobile money has brought benefits such as greater shock-resilience, poverty alleviation, and stimulating...
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
When schools all over the world closed to contain the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, much of the concern was understandably for children’s education. Indeed, the pandemic has been a major setback for learning in many countries, especially for students from...
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Workers in the informal economy do not usually benefit from social protection because they - or their employers - do not contribute to any scheme or fund. It is no surprise, then, that extending social protection has become central to strategies of...
Thursday, January 19, 2023
Kenya has become a poster child for digitally driven development. Known as “Silicon Savannah,” the country has a multi-billion-dollar tech industry that routinely produces startups. Among its most prominent successes is M-Pesa. Launched in 2007, the...
Monday, January 2, 2023
Crisis situations call for rapid assistance – without a lot of red tape. This was clearly illustrated recently by the flood disaster in Pakistan: the floods in August 2022 did not affect only those people who already relied on state support, they also...
Monday, October 31, 2022
An SP-ODE can be thought of as a unified, digital platform to access welfare schemes spanning different departments of the government. It is a multi-sided platform, always involving the citizen and the government and, in more mature systems, also,...
Monday, October 3, 2022
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted how digital public infrastructure (DPI) can play a critical role for governments to deliver social assistance quickly and safely. DPI not only allowed governments to reach an unprecedented number of new...
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Social protection programmes need to be strengthened and expanded across Asia to prepare for the impacts of climate change.
Asia and the Pacific is the most disaster-prone region in the world. It also happens to be the most populous, leaving it...
