This report synthesises learning from child-sensitive social protection programmes in Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Congo, and Senegal. A child-sensitive approach to social protection needs to be informed by the specific vulnerabilities and risks that children and their carers face. Challenges to such an approach in West and Central Africa are political instability, lack of fiscal space, hostile socio-cultural attitudes, and lack of an evidence-based political culture. Social protection design and implementation must be gender- and child-sensitive, and linked to broader reforms to create fiscal space.
Vulnerabilities faced by children and their carers in West and Central Africa (WCA) include: the worst global under-five mortality rate, high and pervasive gender inequality, and harmful gendered practices including female genital mutilation and indentured labour. WCA has the highest aggregate poverty and vulnerability levels in the world, combined with poor governance and very high percentages of children as part of the total population.
Formal social security systems in WCA have historically only provided limited benefits to a minority in formal employment. However, over the past 10 years governments and donors have increased their commitment to social protection in Poverty Reduction Strategies. Approaches vary across the region, but few countries have translated commitment into operational programmes. Most schemes remain small pilot initiatives, largely funded by donors. Government-run social assistance tends to be poorly administered and to reach only a small proportion of the poor. In addition, existing child protection systems in the region are weak and under-resourced.
Ghana’s cash transfer programme, Livelihoods Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), attempts to address these problems through linking cash transfers with complementary services and making them conditional on child-protection related behaviours. However, there are four key challenges to providing sustainable social protection in WCA:
- Political instability and violent conflict. This leaves children especially vulnerable, particularly as they are often left out of post-conflict disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration initiatives.
- Financing. A small number of oil-rich WCA countries have the fiscal space to fund programmes, but they lack the governance and institutional capacity to implement them. The majority of countries are heavily aid-dependant and lack the fiscal space for sustained social protection.
- Socio-cultural attitudes. There is widespread popular scepticism and even hostility to state provision of social protection, and attitudes to children and child rights are discriminatory.
- Lack of an evidence-based political culture. This hampers the design and development of effective social protection policy.
Despite the diversity of contexts within WCA, the paper identifies nine common policy recommendations to suggest a ‘road map’ for social protection reform across the region. These recommendations include the following:
- Develop and adopt national social protection strategies, incorporating a package of social protection instruments and financed implementation plans. Strategies should strengthen and complement social welfare services for children.
- Ensure social protection policy and programming are child- and gender-sensitive. All children, but particularly girls, are highly vulnerable. Monitoring, evaluation, and learning tools must consider age and gender disaggregated indicators and outcomes.
- Increase inter-agency coordination to ensure the complementarity of services and to tackle multi-dimensional vulnerabilities among children. It is also important to develop the capacity of relevant government ministries.
- ‘Ring fence’ and expand social protection provision in response to the lag effects from global financial and food crises.
- Promote public expenditure reform to maximise fiscal space for programmes and frame child-sensitive social protection within the broader public sector reform agenda.
