This policy brief highlights the opportunities and challenges for promoting gender equality and empowerment within a shifting policy landscape. Developed with financial support from the United Nations Development Programme, this brief is intended as an advocacy tool in the service of amplifying gender-informed policy considerations in country-level social protection debates.
The brief describes how social protection strategies are evolving from mere one-off interventions or “safety nets” that mitigate economic harms due to personal misfortune or systemic calamities, to interventions that are also designed to alter or rupture dynamics that are causing vulnerability in the first place.
Key Findings:
- High levels of social protection spending, as a percentage of GDP, are viable even for low-income countries. The knock-on benefits of investing in effective and empowering social protection systems are such that the costs of not investing in social protection need to be taken into account in affordability discussions.
- Social protection strategies are evolving from mere one-off interventions or “safety nets” that mitigate economic harms due to personal misfortune or systemic calamities, to interventions that are also designed to alter or rupture dynamics that are causing vulnerability in the first place.
- Social protection programmes “position” women in varying roles based on the lens through which these programmes “see” women—as consumers, mothers or producers—and expands on the implications for gender equality. A gender-informed social protection system is one that positions women as active participants in economic life rather than mere passive recipients. Such interventions, while simultaneously addressing income volatility, also have the transformative potential to contribute to women’s empowerment.
- Employment guarantee programmes (EGPs), a relatively new instrument, attempt to close income gaps through the expansion of paid work opportunities and the security of a job entitlement. This instrument is of particular importance to members of poor households who cannot find paid work alternatives. In particular, EGPs need to avoid reinforcing inequities that prevail in the rest of the economy—by accounting for women’s disproportionate dedication of time to unpaid work, their systematic exclusion from some occupational categories, and the issue of equal pay for comparable work. The selection of EGP projects also present opportunities for addressing gender equalities; in particular, by reducing women’s unpaid work burdens.
