Fifth meeting of the Federal Social Protection Platform, September, 2022.
The fifth meeting of the Federal Social Protection Platform took place with the support of the SP&PFM Programme on 26 September 2022 in Addis Ababa, bringing together social protection stakeholders to share current developments and experiences on social protection. The Platform works as a multi-stakeholder forum for maintaining momentum and building greater social protection coordination in Ethiopia. Through the Platform, the SP&PFM Programme advocates for strengthening an integrated social protection system with links across sectors and generates inputs to relevant policy, strategy and planning documents.
The Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, which is responsible for coordinating social protection, chairs the Platform, whose members entail social protection stakeholders from the Government, development partners and civil society.
During this fifth meeting, Ministry officials provided updates on implementation of the Urban Destitute Support component of Ethiopia’s Urban Productive Safety Net Project (UPSNJP) that covers children, women with children, adults and older persons. The Project’s coverage will soon increase, with 30 per cent of targeted beneficiaries to come from new cities. Its forthcoming focus will be on family reunification, educational and economic reintegration, and the provision of institutional care for those who cannot be reintegrated for various reasons.
The Project’s Coordination Unit also introduced the transition of its name to the Urban Productive Safety Net and Jobs Project and its two new components:
- Fostering Urban Youth Employment through skills development and apprenticeships, strengthening employment and intermediation services and supporting reforms in job search services
- Contingent Emergency Response Component as an umbrella for emergency response activities that will be addressed through the UPSNJP. The current initiatives entail temporary income support, cash transfers for internally displaced persons and the reconstruction of destroyed social institutions.
Also in the meeting, UNICEF highlighted experiences from Lesotho’s child grant programme, which, according to an impact evaluation, has led to increases in school enrolment rates and a large decrease in school drop-out rates; reduced morbidity among children aged up to 5 years; improvements in birth registration; positive impact on communities’ informal sharing patterns; increases in food security and the ownership of productive assets and improved housing conditions; better capacity to deal with unanticipated shocks and to reduce the likelihood of engaging in disruptive coping strategies; and positive impacts on the local economy. While alignment with local contexts and specificities in programme design matter, the lessons that the evaluation picked up include:
- synergies between emergency cash responses and long-term social protection programmes are crucial to promote resilience;
- the use of existing government structures can increase the speed and efficiency of emergency responses; and
- a national social registry holds great potential for government and United Nations agencies to better link emergency and development programming.
The Social Protection Platform works to ensure that social protection coordination is strengthened and that stakeholders are updated on developments in social protection.
Read more about the SP&PFM Programme in Ethiopia: here