At the 101st International Labour Conference in 2012, 184 members unanimously adopted the Social Protection Floors (SPFs) Recommendation No. 202, which provides guidance to members for establishing and maintaining SPFs as a core element of their national social security systems, guaranteeing access to essential health care and a basic...

What responsibilities exist at the regional level to provide rights-based social protection? The Organization of American States’ Alexandra Barrantes talks about the importance of shifting the focus to people as rights-holders rather than beneficiaries; the role of legal frameworks (such as the San Salvador Protocol) in creating comprehensive social...

How can governments fulfil their obligation to provide social protection and respect the rights of all? Andrés Scagliola from the Government of the City of Montevideo, Uruguay, describes his experience developing and implementing policy that safeguards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people’s right to social...

Social protection has become an ever more important policy discussion in the social development agenda. Significant advances have been made in the social protection field in the Americas and normative and institutional frameworks have been established within the countries to further strengthen social protection policies. Nevertheless, challenges still remain...

The purpose of this handbook is to assist those working directly with people living in extreme poverty to understand the latter’s situation from a human rights perspective, and to suggest actions that can be taken with local governments and other sectors of society to ensure that their rights are...

This background note focuses on the current discussion among actors in the humanitarian and social protection sectors regarding the use of existing social protection programmes to provide an emergency response. It outlines the overlaps between social protection and humanitarian responses, considers a range of recent examples from low- and...

The rights to social protection and water and sanitation can and should be mutually reinforcing, particularly if the linkages are made explicit. Such linkages include both consideration of access to water and sanitation in the design of social protection systems, as well as explicit recognition of the human right...

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), more than one billion people are undernourished. Over two billion suffer from a lack of essential vitamins and minerals in their food. Nearly six million children die every year from malnutrition or related diseases, that is about...

Social protection is an important dimension in the reduction of poverty and multidimensional deprivation. It is an approach towards thinking about the processes, policies and interventions which respond to the economic, social, political and security risks and constraints poor and vulnerable people face, and which will make them less...

ESCWA puts out an newsletter, Social Development Bulletin, which discusses current development issues in the Western Asia region. This edition covers social protection as a method to achieve just and sustainable development.   Link to Arabic...

Twenty years after the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and at a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the international consensus on the need to achieve gender equality seems stronger than ever before. Empowering women and...

Few people would disagree that children need protection and support, and that they should receive priority in policy interventions, including social protection. These beliefs are underpinned by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has been ratified by 192 of 195 of the world’s countries....

How can social protection best be achieved in situations of fragility? This paper argues that while the objectives for social protection in fragile states are essentially the same as in development contexts, social protection instruments, financing and delivery need to be adapted. In order to scale up social protection...

This paper reflects on the methodological implications of operationalising an expanded framework for evaluating social protection programmes. It specifically discusses the combination and integration of methods as part of the expanded evaluation framework, and does so by using an ongoing evaluation of a cash transfer pilot programme in Tigray, Ethiopia as...

Many governments have introduced one-stop shops as part of their reform of the business registration process. But what is a one-stop shop? Is it like any other shop? Can it really involve just one stop? The International Finance Corporation has commissioned this study to provide some background and possibly...

The aim of this research is to identify good and bad practices of Single Window Services around the world, by looking at the experiences of countries where these services are already in place. Link to Word...

Recalling previous recommendations, the Committee observed that the austerity measures in conjunction with the continuous contractions of the economy, employment and public finances posed a threat to the viability of the Greek national social security system, resulting in the impoverishment of the population, thus undermining the application of all...

The Court was requested to examine whether Article 109 para. 1 of the Law of Azerbaijan Republic On Pension Maintenance of Citizens, allowing an 80 per cent reduction of pensions for entitled persons who are incarcerated, was inconsistent with the right to social protection, contained in Article 38 of...

The Judicial Yuan, a body responsible for interpreting the Constitution, examined the constitutionality of provisions in the Statute for Labor Insurance preventing children adopted within less than six months of the death of their adoptive parents from collecting social insurance benefits as survivors. The Court held that despite the...

This report has the objective of documenting the key elements of the ongoing social protection policy reform in Mozambique and exploring the technical and financial arguments underlying the Government’s policy options for the implementation of a national social protection floor in the country. The report is organised in 5...

This report sets out to elaborate and promote a human rights framework for social protection, identifying best practices and disseminating lessons learned. It provides an in-depth analysis of the application of central human rights principles of the human rights framework – equality and non-discrimination (including accessibility, acceptability, affordability and the incorporation...

The interdependence, indivisibility and mutually reinforcing nature of human rights necessitates a holistic approach to social protection. As such, under international human rights law, social protection programmes should be one element within a broader strategy aimed at overcoming poverty and realizing all human rights, including economic, social and cultural...

Summary: In 2000, twenty Latvian parliamentarians complained to Latvia’s Constitutional Court that certain employers within Latvia were not paying social insurance premiums into a fund for their employees, and that this was a breach of the human right to social security as per Latvia’s constitution as well as Articles...

Summary: In 2001 the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties claimed that that recent starvation deaths that occurred in the Indian State of Rajasthan were the result of the State’s failure to release grain stocks in fact kept as a guard against famine, and that this denial amounted to a...

In the context of the principles of social protection, through the Social Charter of the Americas,1 the countries of the region acknowledge they have “a responsibility to develop and implement comprehensive social protection policies and programs, based on the principles of universality, solidarity, equality, nondiscrimination, and equity that give...