Great expansion — remaining gaps: Social protection in the face of the coronavirus pandemic
While the effects of COVID-19 are felt by both rich and poor, the availability of resources and mechanisms to cope are distributed highly unequally.
“How can we stay at home without food? We cannot live in the house. You will die in the house” — says Ann Gakenia Muthungu, a 69 year old single mother and grandmother, taking care of seven children in an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya.
While the effects of the new coronavirus COVID-19 are felt by both rich and poor, the availability of resources and mechanisms to cope are distributed highly unequally. This will deepen existing inequalities if left unchecked.
An essential way of ensuring that economic shocks or health crises do not turn into human tragedies is social protection. Coronavirus has shown us that the majority of humanity are at risk; that most people are just a paycheck away from destitution.
In previous crises social protection acted as a powerful stabilizer for individuals, households, and entire economies. Social protection also contributes to keeping inequality in check during crises, when it protects the incomes, health and livelihoods of those that would otherwise be forced into poverty, would need to sell assets, become heavily indebted or engage in dangerous work to survive.
Most of us lack social protection
Tragically, even before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, four billion people did not have any formal social protection. In many contexts informal mutual aid mechanisms provide an essential lifeline, when everything else fails.
The current pandemic shock, however, affects entire communities, which limits the impacts of community coping mechanisms, making a formal social protection response ever more necessary.
Oxfam calls for a massive expansion of benefits in cash and kind to millions of people currently without or with too little social protection.
In government responses to Coronavirus we are seeing some countries taking big steps. Nevertheless far more still could and should be done:
More people are reached, and rules are relaxed
Governments of more than 190 countries have taken social protection measures, reaching an impressive 1.7 billion people. Myanmar alone has added 21 million people to its previous 240,000 people receiving social protection transfers. But also countries with initially higher coverage rates, such as Bangladesh and Indonesia, still more than doubled the number of people supported using different options to rapidly expand coverage.
Many countries have removed requirements that poor people behave in a particular way to access benefits — an important way to ensure more people are reached.
Many people receive larger amounts
Making larger amounts of money available is often necessary as benefit levels are woefully inadequate to make ends meet. Mongolia tops the list with a whopping 400% increase in benefit levels compared to pre-crisis.
Higher benefits under existing schemes can make a significant contribution to avert a humanitarian crisis, as calculations for South Africa show.
Next to increasing cash, more than 80 countries have increased in kind benefits such as subsidized food rations, a much needed lifeline especially where markets have been closed.
Some previously excluded groups are benefiting at last …
Sadly, many of the expansions are still relying on existing schemes to target the poorest, excluding many more in need of protection.
Only a few interventions have aimed at reaching universal coverage. One example comes from Bolivia, where the government instituted — in addition to two cash schemes, a third one to prevent that informal workers and the self-employed, who are excluded from most social protection programs, would fall through the cracks. Together the three programs are expected to reach 97.9 percent of the country’s population.
Designing benefits for women is still not standard
This crisis is aggravating gender inequities, as it feeds on existing deep inequalities between men and women in labor markets, in unpaid care responsibilities and in access to resources, and in social protection. In the first round of social protection responses only 11% were to some degree gender-sensitive.
One way of making sure women are covered, is by taking measures for the informally employed — especially in places, where women predominantly work in the informal sector.
Increases in child care allowances, for example in South Africa, are instrumental to compensate for women’s increased care work during the pandemic. But only nine countries had put such measures in place by June 2020.
Few make sure protection lasts beyond the pandemic
The expansion of social protection is welcome and should be sustained.
It is a sign that many systems are shock-responsive and can be scaled up when needed. But, given the disastrous gap in social protection pre-crisis, it cannot suffice that the measures currently adopted last on average just three months.
One of the big challenges is to make sure that the expansion of social protection is here to stay. So far, only the Spanish government made its new social assistance scheme permanent.
Still, a galaxy worth of gaps to fill
Despite the progress made, a lot more needs to be done, both in the design and scope of social protection. Rights-based social protection for all citizens, should be promoted rather than piecemeal ‘safety nets’ approaches. This could be done through universal benefits, like those for all old people and all children, which avoid complex often erroneous systems that decide who is poor and who is not. Behavioral and patronizing conditions on social protection should be lifted for good.
Even if we assume, the 1.7 billion people covered now, were among the four billion not covered prior to the new expansion in social protection that still leaves more than two billion uncovered, many of them women. Hence, governments still need to step up. But also more international commitment is necessary: in the form of debt cancellation, as well as in aid, and better coordination of the funds available.
Finally, to fulfill the universal right to social protection, proclaimed 75 years ago, and to build a better future for all, the community of nations needs to set up a global solidarity mechanism, its time has come.
This entry posted on 17 August 2020, by Dr. Ellen Ehmke, who works as social inequality analyst for Oxfam Germany and co-leads Oxfam’s work on social protection policy.
