The gig economy – in which digital platforms link workers with the purchasers of their services – is growing globally. Yet there has been little research to date on its impacts in low- and middle-income countries or on gendered experiences of gig work. This lack of knowledge critically limits...

In 2015, leaders of all countries committed to “eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere” by 2030. In the past 25 years, the world has managed to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty. Yet despite this progress, at least 400 million people will still be living on...

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has given a new urgency to efforts to confront deficits in employment. We take up the call to improve the working conditions of informal workers who face being left behind given that processes of formalisation are unlikely to incorporate them in...

Women’s economic empowerment has gained increasing attention within the global development agenda in recent years, bolstered by the adoption of a range of relevant targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. Yet the specific experiences of older women often remain underexplored and unrecognised, leaving them invisible to...

Women’s economic empowerment has gained increasing attention within the global development agenda in recent years, bolstered by the adoption of a range of relevant targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. Yet the specific experiences of older women often remain underexplored and unrecognised, leaving them invisible to...

Knowing how climate hazards affect people’s resilience over time is crucial in designing more effective development and humanitarian interventions. This is particularly important in post-disaster contexts, where people’s livelihood opportunities and wellbeing changes rapidly during the long road to recovery. Yet, to date, our knowledge of resilience is largely...

Aspirations play a vital role in shaping young people’s life choices, particularly when it comes to making decisions about education and jobs. However, youth employment programmes – which seek to provide young people with the skills and opportunities needed to secure employment and achieve higher living standards – rarely...

Around the world, there are between 93 million and 150 million children and adolescents with disabilities. An estimated 80% live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where 80% of persons with disabilities live below the poverty line. While we know that adolescents with disabilities are far more likely than...

Around the world, there are between 93 million and 150 million children and adolescents living with disabilities. Most of those children (80%) live in the global South, where 80% of persons with disabilities live below the poverty line. Children and adolescents with disabilities are far more likely than their...

Whilst older people have special needs, they also have unique skills, experiences and roles within their families, communities and societies. These roles continue to a certain extent during droughts, though household burdens may increase as younger adults have migrated or are grazing livestock further away. At the same time, droughts...

‘Leave no one behind’ is a principle central to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This policy briefing, based on five years’ research by the PRISE project, puts forward the view that governments, development partners and investors must prioritise investments to tackle poverty and climate vulnerability in dryland...

Key Messages Migration isn’t driven by a lack of water and sanitation services, but providing services can support successful migration. The barriers faced by migrants make achieving the SDGs’ ambitions of universal access more challenging. Challenges stem from failures in governance, not the amount of water available, numbers of...

Key messages Migration can contribute to improving access to reliable, affordable modern energy services (SDG target 7.1) through higher incomes for migrants and the sending of remittances. The informal or irregular status of many migrants is a barrier to universal access to modern energy services. Migrants in informal settlements...

This briefing considers the extent to which international labour migrants are covered by social protection, and the implications this has for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). More specifically, this brief shows that social protection coverage of international labour migrants varies considerably, and outlines how this has...

This briefing summarizes the findings on the impacts of cash transfers on women and girls. These are drawn from a rigorous review of the evidence looking at the impacts of cash transfers across six outcome areas. The review covered literature spanning 15 years (2000–2015). It is distinct from other...

This background paper examines the role of social protection programmes in supporting education in conflict-affected contexts. Drawing on existing literature, the paper looks at the impact, design and implementation issues of social protection programme experience in conflict, protracted crisis and post-conflict contexts, including in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of...

Brazil is one of the richest countries in the world, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $10,427 in 2009. Growth rates increased from 1.9% to 5.1% per year from 1998 to 2008. Yet the country also has one of the highest rates of inequality in the...

Cash transfers have been increasingly adopted by countries worldwide as central elements of their social protection and poverty reduction strategies. A growing number of studies provide rigorous evidence on the impact of cash transfers, and the role of specific cash transfer design and implementation features in shaping outcomes. This...

It is argued that social protection can reduce the extent to which marginalized people and groups are socially excluded. This paper investigates this thesis by considering what causes marginalization in the first place and what is needed to change the dynamics of exclusion. Using examples from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India...

The expansion of social protection in low- and middle-income countries over the last two decades has been accompanied by a growing number of studies on the distributional impact of social protection spending. When such analyses consider social protection separately from tax policy, they provide a partial picture of the...

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...

This study examines the delivery and impact of Nepal’s Child Grant, so as to identify implementation barriers and recommend ways to improve effectiveness. The cash transfer is targeted at all households with children aged up to five years in the Karnali zone and at poor Dalit households in the...

Social protection has become an increasingly prominent public policy tool in Nepal over the past two decades. Since the insurgency’s end in 2006, the government, with the support of development partners, has explicitly integrated social protection programming into its broader post-conflict development and reconstruction agenda (Holmes and Uphadya, 2009;...

This briefing paper from the Overseas Development Institute examines the state of child social protection in...

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...