World Bank’s Month-Long Event
Social Protection Coverage & Recovering from Crises such as COVID-19
For the first time, the World Bank is offering a global Social Protection & Jobs (SPJ) event at no cost, and with interpretation available both in Arabic and French.
This year, the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice will host a virtual Core Knowledge Exchange event (CKEx). While the COVID-19 pandemic prevents us from meeting in person, we will bring together global experts, World Bank staff, practitioners, policymakers, and others for a month-long event beginning May 3, 2021, and running through May 26.
Theme: The CKEx event will focus on two overarching themes:
- Expanding Social Protection coverage to all:
- Responding to and recovering from crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Motivation
Many households are still unprotected and vulnerable to shocks and fluctuations in income. This includes the “missing middle” of households without social protection coverage, who are mostly employed informally, and who will require innovative and integrated responses to be brought into SP systems. Social protection systems must expand, be flexible, and make us changing technology and demands to achieve universal protection. Similarly, workers and households must have the tools and support to create and seize new opportunities for integration into productive work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated labor markets around the world. Millions of workers have lost their jobs, millions more are out of the labor force altogether. The impacts of these changes will differ significantly: women, younger workers, those with less education and fewer skills, migrants and refugees, and the elderly and disabled, are likely to suffer more. Above all are the millions of informal workers and their families who are not covered by existing SP/SN systems. On the other hand, the COVID-19 crisis may present an opportunity to build more inclusive and effective Social Protection Systems, promote investments for green jobs and growth, to enhance resilience for the future.
Approach
The CKEx aims to advance client capability and engagement by:
- Building capacity- on expanding and strengthening Social Protection and Jobs programs to cover vulnerable but uninsured households;
- Sharing experiences from clients, implementing agencies, and policymakers on building successful adaptive and responsive SPJ programs to deal with future crises; and
- Reflecting on ways to advance understanding of how policies, programs, and instruments can support and build on the post-COVID recovery in social protection, livelihoods, well-being, and human capital development.
Audience
The audience for the CKEx will come from a wide range of Social Protection and Jobs counterparts, including policymakers, policy analysts, research staff and professionals from public and private institutions, Government ministries and implementing agencies. Participants may be nominated by or through Regional Focal Points so if you have potential participants in mind please contact the relevant RFP to have them added to the list. Participation in the CKEx will be by invitation only issued through the Core Team. All participants must register. Participants (including presenters) are invited to attend all sessions.
Session format
Sessions should take the following approach: A framing presentation, academic findings and research or syntheses in the first half, presented by Bank staff. The second half should be case studies presented by country and partner counterparts. Cases studies will be selected in collaboration between Session Leads and Regional Focal Points
Language
The working language of the event is English
Agenda
The four weeks are divided into three thematic buckets and one week of special topics. The thematic buckets are as follows:
Scaling up SPJ programs to reach more vulnerable households
Most countries have SPJ programs that target the poorest households, although not always successfully or completely. Many countries also have Social Insurance programs to protect formal sector workers. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the inability of many systems to cover households adequately or to extend coverage to unprotected but vulnerable households. Among those excluded by most existing programs are informal sector workers, the self-employed, and those on the margins of poverty, who have been exposed to severe and uninsured risks during the pandemic. Many of these households are too poor to afford social insurance, do not have access to long-term saving instruments, and are not poor enough to qualify for social assistance. These sessions will discuss policies for and experiences with systems to expanding coverage to the currently excluded, in the “missing middle” and on the periphery for whom economic inclusion is paramount.
Tools and innovations
Technological developments offer opportunities to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of program design, targeting, delivery, and monitoring. How can SPJ systems take advantage of these developments to reach more poor and vulnerable households? How can these developments enhance system responsiveness, flexibility and adaptability, so that SPJ programs can scale up and down in response to changing circumstances? What do these developments mean for the future of work? What is needed to enable workers and firms to take advantage of digital platforms and markets? Topics include technology for critical business processes such as MIS/Big Data, ID4D; technology for service delivery: digital payments, increasing financial access and mobile coverage, counselling and case management, labor market information systems, etc.
Building back better
The COVID 19 pandemic has tested the ability of existing SPJ systems to respond quickly and effectively. It has also disrupted and accelerated changes to Social Assistance, Social Insurance and Labor Market policies. At the same time, the crisis provides an opportunity to rethink the future role of SPJ programs. This week will focus on these opportunities and the possibilities for the redesign of SPJ systems and programs. How can SPJ systems best support the post-COVID recovery of employment, enterprise, human capital investment, and sustainable growth? How can SPJ systems take advantage of the current crisis to expand coverage? What innovations in program design and delivery can yield more comprehensive and responsive systems to address future crises?
Special Topics in Social Protection and Jobs
While most of the challenges facing SPJ systems can be broadly defined to reach more poor and vulnerable groups, there are cases that have unique challenges and require specific attention, and the impact of the pandemic has differed across environments and groups. Topics include: (1) designing SPJ programs to confront and reduce gender-based violence; (2) delivering SPJ programs and services in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and integrating humanitarian and domestic SPJ services; (3) providing SPJ services to aging populations who may require expanded long-term care, and support to enable older workers to remain active in the labor market; (4) providing adequate services to increasingly urbanizing populations and poverty, and taking advantage of opportunities from agglomeration. (5) designing and delivering Social Protection for persons with disabilities, both in terms of services and ensuring opportunities for employment; and (6) understanding innovations in financing, especially as countries expand coverage and move from employment-based programs to universal protection.
English 
العربية 