Social Protection Programs for Africa’s Drylands explores the role of social protection in promoting the well-being and prosperity of people living in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a specific focus on the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Based on a review of recent experience, it...

The literature on shock-responsive social protection focuses on operational features that improve the speed and reach of the response, but little is known about the optimal design of emergency social protection responses in terms of which programs to use, information about the people affected,...

This paper explores the social protection response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to learn lessons on how to build the resilience of their social protection system. These countries made substantial efforts to address the most serious consequences of...

Poverty has been declining in Sub-Saharan Africa, but millions are still poor or vulnerable. To address this ongoing and complex problem, all countries in the region have now deployed social safety net programs as part of their core development plans. The number of programs has skyrocketed since...

Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these...

This case study suggests how shock-responsive social protection systems can be the basis of a government-led response to a health crisis and a rapid-onset disaster. It also points to how linking pre-arranged finance to safety nets can help with quick delivery of cash to vulnerable populations...

The literature on shock-responsive social protection focuses on operational features that improve the speed and reach of the response, but little is known about the optimal design of emergency social protection responses in terms of which programs to use, information about the people affected,...