11 December, Rome - With approximately 3.4 million USD received from the Joint SDG Fund, FAO will contribute to the design and implementation of innovative joint UN programmes in eight countries across regions in the next two years.
The first of its kind, the Joint SDG Fund is an inter-agency mechanism for strategic financing and integrated policy support. In March 2019, the Joint SDG Fund placed its first call for proposals on the theme of “Leaving No One Behind - Social Protection”, in which FAO participated successfully.

Why social protection?
That the Joint SDG Fund chose social protection as the theme for its first call for proposals attests to the growing consensus on the urgency of addressing inequalities and challenges to social inclusion - and on social protection as a key vehicle for addressing those challenges in a sustainable manner. Social protection is an effective way to address poverty and inequality, reaching those left behind. It helps increase and diversify people’s income and addresses vulnerabilities and risks across the whole life cycle, accelerating progress towards the SDGs.

Paving the way to 2030 through social protection
FAO is currently contributing to eight of the 32 joint programs that were ultimately approved by the Joint SDG Fund. 17 organizations, mostly from within the UN family, are responsible for the selected 32 joint programs, which cover all five regions; the programs FAO is involved in are concentrated in the Africa, Latin America, and Asia regions, specifically in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico, Philippines, and Mongolia. ILO, UN WOMEN, UNDP, WFP, UNICEF, and UNFPA are FAO’s program and implementation partners in these eight countries.

Across the eight programs, FAO complements its partners’ expertise in three areas:

• In program countries where social protection coverage is still limited, FAO helps to bring social protection to rural areas, so that farmers, fishers, and forest-dependent communities can be lifted out of extreme poverty, enabling their social and economic inclusion.
• In program countries where social protection systems are already in place, the focus is on boosting the productive potential of rural households, so they can adopt efficient and sustainable practices, in turn increasing the impact of social protection. 
• In fragile and humanitarian contexts, FAO supports the design and implementation of social protection systems that take risk and shock-response into account, enhancing communities' ability to respond to crisis, and helping to bridge the humanitarian-development-peace divide.

FAO’s contribution to the global social protection agenda
As a comparatively new area of engagement, FAO’s work on social protection embodies the new ways of thinking the Joint SDG Fund promotes: FAO’s social protection initiatives are centered around context-specific, scalable, and integrated approaches that have been evolved in partnership with the UNDS, to fill gaps of expertise and accelerate sustainable rural development.

Overall, FAO’s role is to bring a social, pro-poor perspective to agricultural investment and rural development programs, which often don’t effectively cover vulnerable rural population groups. At the same time, FAO enriches social protection approaches with a livelihoods perspective, which increases their economic and productive impact on households and rural economies. In fact, one of FAO’s major contributions to the global social protection agenda is to demonstrate how appropriately designed, integrated rural social protection policies and programs have significant productive and economic impacts on participant households as well as enhancing the economic dynamic of local territories.

More about the Joint SDG Fund
The Joint SDG Fund starts from the understanding that, to transform our world in the way the 2030 Agenda envisions, we need integrated economic, social and environmental policies, informed by a rights-based agenda, along with a more effective United Nations Development System (UNDS) that is supported by significant volumes of new financing. It provides flexible, reliable, and regular support to development programs that embody new ways of thinking: initiatives built on context-specific, scalable, and integrated approaches. It prioritizes collaborative and joint programming among UN Agencies, identifying specific comparative advance and technical contributions from the different teams.

The Joint SDG Fund only supports programs that are Government-led and draw on expertise and innovation from across the UNDS and a broad range of partners, reflecting different country contexts. Only programs developed and implemented jointly by two or more organizations are eligible for funding, with the UN Regional Coordinators leading the preparation and implementation of programs and pooling the expertise from across the UNDS. All projects approved under the first call for proposals reflect the integrated nature of the SDGs, operationalize the ‘Leaving No One Behind’ principle, and mainstream human rights, gender, environment, disability, and youth.

More information:

FAO’s Social Protection website
http://www.fao.org/social-protection

Contact: 

Natalia Winder Rossi
Senior Adviser/Social Protection Team Leader
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Email: [email protected]