This webinar was organised with support from the European Union.

Social protection webinar series: Shock-responsive social protection for resilience building

2 August 2016 – 10.30 - 12.00 CEST

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Speaker:

• Natalia Winder Rossi, Senior Social Protection Officer, Social Protection Team Leader and Delivery Manager, FAO

Moderator:

• Benjamin Davis, Strategic Programme Leader, Rural Poverty Reduction, FAO

In the context of the increased complexity of crises, protracted displacement, overstretched capacity and the lack of resources for meeting growing humanitarian needs, development and humanitarian actors are joining forces to find innovative approaches to effectively address these needs.

Within this framework, FAO and its partners recognize that scaling-up cash-based programming as well as risk-informed and shock-responsive social protection systems are a strategic priority to improve food security and nutrition and to protect households’ assets as well as increase income of the most vulnerable population. Indeed, access to predictable, sizable and regular social protection benefits can, in the short-term, protect poor households from the impacts of shocks, including erosion of productive assets, and can minimize negative coping practices. In the longer term, social protection can help build capacity, smooth consumption, and allow for investments that contribute to building the resilience of people to future threats and crisis.

In humanitarian and fragile contexts, when markets function and currency is stable, cash-based interventions are recognized as flexible and cost-effective instruments for addressing the most pressing needs of populations affected by shocks. In these settings, where the provision of governmentally led social protection services is absent or weak, FAO sees its strategic role in supporting the design of cash and “cash+” type of interventions while supporting the capacity development of local stakeholders. These interventions aim at being a starting point for the development of national social protection systems that are risk-informed and responsive to shocks to be used to plan timely and efficient responses to emergencies. Such a response might involve increasing the amount of a transfer to cover additional needs (vertical expansion), temporarily expanding the number of beneficiaries receiving a transfer (horizontal expansion) or complementing the transfer with other components to enhance the protection of assets.

The webinar presents the concept and rationale behind risk-informed and shock-responsive social protection systems, building on FAO position paper “Social Protection and Resilience Building: Supporting Livelihoods in Protracted Crises, Fragile and Humanitarian Contexts” developed in partnership with the support of the institute for development studies (IDS). This paper also strongly builds on the Social Protection Inter-Agency Coordination Board (SPIAC-B) statement to the World Humanitarian Summit. We encourage participants to review FAO position paper and provide inputs and suggestions during the webinar to further enhance this joint approach.