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Many studies have provided global and regional overviews of the state of social protection policies and their importance to poverty reduction, food security and nutrition. However, little is known about how such policies are designed and implemented in rural areas, or how they complement and link to agricultural support programmes, which may cover the same geographical areas and reach similar types of beneficiaries. Both social protection and agricultural policies are needed for poverty reduction in poor rural populations.

Yet coordination between the two sectors is generally limited and, until recently, little attention has been paid to their complementarities and how these might be exploited to improve rural livelihoods. This study contributes to filling these gaps by documenting and analysing recent trends in social assistance programme implementation at global and regional levels, and identifying the programmes that are fully or partially designed to focus on rural areas. It also identifies social assistance programmes with an explicit agriculture production support component and/or linkages with existing agricultural support programmes, as well as support programmes with explicit social assistance components and/or linkages with such programmes.