In 2008, when food prices rose precipitously to record highs, international attention and local policy in many countries focused on safety nets as part of the response. Now that food prices are high again, the issue of appropriate responses is again on the policy agenda. This note sets out a...

This paper reviews a small community-based school feeding program launched in Togo in response to the 2007/08 food price crisis. The discussion focuses on the operational and policy lessons emerging from the program, to better understand opportunities for scale up and sustainability in the...

Pension and social insurance programs that prevent a substantial loss in consumption resulting from old age, disability, or death are an integral part of any social protection system. The dual objectives of such programs are to allow for the prevention of a sharp decline in income when these...

Despite modest economic growth over the past decade, the Philippines have made little progress in reducing poverty. In this regard, the Philippines is an outlier in the region, seemingly unable to translate economic growth into meaningful poverty reduction. This underscores the fact that...

This note summarizes activation policy strategies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Policy makers can choose from a broad menu of options. Each of them comes with potential strengths and weaknesses, but there can also be important links between them. To...

Together with reductions in indirect taxes on food imports, cash for work programs were one of the main responses implemented by African governments following the food, fuel, and financial crisis of recent years. The main objective of those programs was to help the poor cope with the various...

This report presents available evidence on adult education and training in Europe and Central Asia (ECA), differentiating two separate types: continuing vocational education and training (CVET) for the employed, sought either by employers or individuals, and retraining and second chance...

The main focus of the social protection and labor portfolio is on strengthening client's institutional capacity in the design and implementation of programs, but projects are not well equipped to track progress in this area. Correspondingly, there is a need to strengthen approaches to measuring...

The Philippine social protection notes series aims to summarize the good practices and key findings from the Philippines on the topics related to social protection, covering a variety of types of issues including Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) and targeting, broadening the social protection...

Social funds represent a diverse universe of World Bank projects. Social funds are defined as agencies or programs that channel grants to communities for small scale development projects. Social funds typically finance some mixture of socio economic infrastructure (e.g. building or...