Charting a Course toward Universal Social Protection
Explore the urgent need for an updated World Bank social protection strategy in the rapidly changing global context.
Image
The Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) Compass puts at its heart the vision of universal social protection. It recognizes that the progressive realization of universal social protection (USP), which ensures access to social protection for all whenever and however they need it, is critical for effectively reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Countries across the globe are increasingly using this vision to guide their policy.
Social protection can be defined as policies and programs that help individuals and societies to manage risk and volatility, protect them from poverty and inequality, and help them to access economic opportunity. Social protection aims to achieve this by increasing people’s resilience, equity and opportunity, the three goals of social protection, by means of a range of instruments in the social insurance, labor and economic inclusion, and social assistance and care domains. This set of interventions is collectively referred to in the SPJ Compass as social protection.
An update to the World Bank strategy for social protection is urgent amid rapid change both within the sector and beyond. As the world begins to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, both the unprecedented crisis that it caused and the immediate arrival of new global shocks has reinforced the need for social protection in dramatic ways. At the same time, the crisis has highlighted a new and rapidly evolving set of possibilities for design and delivery of social protection.
The current World Bank strategy, “Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity: The World Bank’s Social Protection and Labor Strategy 2012–2022,” provided an overarching framework for understanding the value of investing in social protection programs and outlined how the World Bank would work with client countries to further develop their social protection programs and systems. The SPJ Compass aims to build on that framework in recognition of how fundamentally the global context has changed for the World Bank’s work in the sector.
Progress toward Universal Social Protection
In order to determine future strategic priorities, it is first necessary to assess the progress being made toward achieving USP around the world, as well as the challenges that remain. The goals of equity, resilience, and opportunity provide a useful organizing framework for this assessment. Different programs and instruments almost always contribute to more than one of these goals. In the assessment that follows, they are discussed primarily under the goal to which they most contribute. Delivery systems and financing for social protection are identified as two crosscutting enabling factors that have underpinned recent progress, and, therefore, they merit their own discussion.
To effectively contribute to the goals of equity, resilience and opportunity, social protection programs need to work together as a system of complementary initiatives. Social protection systems are “portfolios” of programs that work together at three levels. At the policy level, the entire portfolio of programs should be coherently aligned to support national goals and social contracts. At the program level, there is a focus on design and implementation issues, for a given program, and across programs, with the aim of promoting harmonization and/or integration of similar programs, and coordination among programs aimed at similar groups. At the administration level, delivery systems should be designed with the necessary capacity to facilitate programs’ core business processes. These often enable the systems approach being promoted at higher levels.
Priorities for Supporting Social Protection
Several broad areas have emerged as priorities for World Bank support to countries for social protection. The framework for achieving USP, as well as evidence on the progress and remaining challenges, as presented in the previous sections, provide guidance for the World Bank’s social protection work in the years ahead. Five key areas have been identified:
- Build Strong Foundational Social Protection Systems.
- Address the Coverage Gap: Increase Coverage and Promote Greater Inclusion.
- Address the Flexibility Gap: Build More Resilient, Adaptive, and Dynamic Programming.
- Address the Opportunity Gap: Scale-up More Effective Economic Inclusion and Labor Systems.
- Address the Fiscal Gap: Create More Fiscal Space for Universal Social Protection.