EC Staff Seminar on Social protection across the humanitarian-development nexus

The EC reiterated its commitment to better work with social protection systems and approaches as an effective short and long-term response to multivariate shocks, protracted (food/humanitarian) crises and forced displacement during the International conference on Social protection in contexts of Fragility and Forced Displacement held in Brussels on 28-29 September 2017.

To delve into this cutting-elde issue, and explore how to translate this commitment into EC policy and programming, a Staff seminar on Social protection across the humanitarian-development nexus was held on 23-26 October 2017 in Brussels. It brought together 50 colleagues across ECHO, DEVCO, EEAS and NEAR from over 20 countries. Building on the emerging field of knowledge and practice, the seminar focused on two specific questions:

• How to work with social protection systems and approaches to prepare for, mitigate, respond to and recover from crises;
• How humanitarian interventions can contribute over the long-term to the progressive building of sustainable national social protection systems, which in turn can contribute to mitigating future shocks and building the resilience of populations to withstand future shocks and creating an exit strategy for humanitarian interventions.

This four-day learning event, with specific studies on Malawi, Yemen and Somalia, allowed for good exchanges and better understanding of the potential of social protection instruments and approaches, and created an opportunity for staff across ECHO, DEVCO, EEAS and NEAR to discuss social protection as an instrument to respond to humanitarian and development needs in drought-prone environments, conflict-affected contexts and fragile states.

The conversation will continue on the new online group on « social protection across the humanitarian-development nexus » (https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/sp-nexus).

This learning event is part of a broader initiative jointly led by DEVCO B3, DEVCO C1 and ECHO aimed at developing a common Guidance Package on Social protection across the humanitarian-development nexus.