ODI Working Paper 614 - Social protection response to  Covid-19 and beyond  Emerging evidence and learning for future crises

Working Paper 614 -  Social protection response to  Covid-19 and beyond  Emerging evidence and learning for future crises authored by Francesca Bastagli and Christina Lowe

This paper was completed as part of the project Social Protection Response to Covid-19 and Beyond: Lessons Learned for Adaptive Social Protection, led by Francesca Bastagli with support from Francesca Iannini and Christy Lowe at ODI, funded by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Key messages of this paper are:

The Covid-19 crisis has brought social protection to the forefront as a crisis response tool. It has also exposed social protection gaps and limitations. Some of the population groups most adversely affected by the crisis – women, informal workers, urban dwellers, refugees – are also those excluded from or underserved by social protection.

The unprecedented social protection response, in terms of number of measures taken and resources mobilised since the onset of Covid-19 compared with past global crises, includes measures to address coverage and adequacy gaps, at least in the short term. These shed light on the policy design and implementation features that enable, or hinder, timely and adequate crisis response. They also hold potential for learning and addressing gaps and constraints in the longer term for social protection policy and system strengthening.

If the Covid-19 crisis and social protection crisis response are to make a difference to progress towards inclusive, adaptive and sustainable social protection, harnessing the momentum around social protection and institutionalising learning to date are key.