Publications

This paper outlines how climate change can create specific gendered risks based on age and stage of the life course.

Critical gendered risks for women that increase their vulnerability to climate shocks include: discriminatory social and gender norms; inadequate access to and control of assets and crucial resources; concentration in low-wage casual employment; limited representation in policy discussions and key decision-making processes.

Gender-responsive and age-sensitive social protection – an important instrument in a suite of tools in the broader response to the climate crisis – can play a crucial role in addressing or minimizing negative climate impacts, including those that affect girls, boys and women.

Social protection is a universal human right and a precondition for a world free from poverty. It is also a vital foundation to help the world’s most vulnerable children fulfil their potential and increase their access to food, nutrition, education, and healthcare. 

But worldwide, 1.77 billion children aged 0–18 lack access to a child or family cash benefit, a fundamental pillar of a social protection system. Children are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as adults. Approximately 800 million children are subsisting below a poverty line of US$3.20 a day, and 1 billion children are experiencing multidimensional poverty. The impact on their lives, communities, societies, and economies can be devastating. 

The second International Labour Organization (ILO) – United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) joint report on social protection for children reflects the shared commitment to strengthening social protection systems and expanding them to reach every child at risk. It explains why universal social protection should become a reality. It also documents the rapid positive changes in countries from Montenegro to Tunisia and the steps needed to accelerate progress.

This policy brief is the third in a series that assesses key issues affecting social spending as part of UNICEF’s work on Public Finance for Children.

It aims to add to the understanding on of what climate change means for social sector budgets, and the extent to which social sectors are being prioritized in the climate response.

 Social sectors face rising climate-related costs but positive opportunities to raise the required additional financing required remain. These include: leveraging green technologies; reforming energy subsidies and harnessing green financing initiatives.   

Integrated social protection programmes are increasingly being pursued as more effective and efficient ways to improve children’s health and nutrition outcomes. UNICEF Ethiopia is implementing a pilot Integrated Safety Net Programme (ISNP) in the Amhara region of Ethiopia aimed at integrating a cash transfer (through the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)), a health insurance (the Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI)), social and behaviour change communication (on nutrition, feeding practices, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, and child marriage), and case management (for malnourished and out of school children).

The ISNP implementation began in early 2019. Knowing that integration comes with its own challenges in terms of planning, coordination, harmonization of systems and tools, and the alignment of budgets, this qualitative study sought to understand the status of implementation, emerging challenges, and potential remedial actions to ensure the intervention achieves the stated objectives. The study shows that while there is progress, more action is needed in terms of implementing the planned management information system (MIS), ensuring adequate and well trained frontline workers are in place, further improving harmonization of targeting tools, and increasing budgetary allocation.

This new ILO-UNICEF report provides a rigorous review of what the latest research says about the power of social protection to combat child labour. Providing families with direct assistance to help them weather crises can help reduce negative coping strategies like child labour and child marriage.

Does governments’ social spending reduce infant mortality? If so, what are the causal mechanisms behind this effect? Using evidence from 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (1990 to 2017), this paper examines various influences – including decreased income inequality and dependence on natural resources – to determine if and how increased public expenditure in the social sector is causally linked with reduced infant mortality.

Adolescents face unique vulnerabilities related to their health, schooling and the intensification of gender socialization. As the next generation next in line to become adults, their transition has major implications for the future health, economic growth and well-being of nations. Yet, children and adolescents have low rates of social protection coverage globally – a missed opportunity for investment.

This report examines how social protection can promote adolescent well-being and facilitate safe and productive transitions to adulthood in lower- and middle-income countries. Focusing on government, non-contributory programmes, the following questions are examined: 1) whether and how current non-contributory social  protection programmes are adolescent-sensitive and 2) what is the impact of non-contributory social protection programmes on adolescents.

The importance of mainstreaming gender into social protection policies and programmes is increasingly recognized. However, evidence on the extent to which this is actually happening remains limited. This report contributes to filling this evidence gap by drawing on the findings of two complementary research projects undertaken by UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti and UN Women in 2019.

Using a specifically developed analytical framework, these two projects reviewed 50 national social protection strategies and 40 social protection programmes across a total of 74 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to assess the extent to which they incorporate gender equality concerns.

Compounding the COVID-19 pandemic is a looming debt crisis for low- and middle-income countries where a growing debt burden threatens to crowd out social spending for children.

This policy brief explores whether the current support from the international community is enough to maintain spending on basic services during COVID-19. It highlights countries that are most at risk due to high levels of poverty, as well as those less likely to benefit from the G20 Debt Standstill (DSSI). It concludes that a new international debt restructuring architecture, which encompasses the needs of poorer countries, is crucial to protecting children’s rights in the wake of COVID-19. 

UNICEF supports the Government of Ethiopia to implement a pilot Integrated Safety Net Programme (ISNP) in the Amhara Region from 2019 to 2023. The objective of the programme is to harness the potential synergies that can be realized by integrating social protection policies and programmes. It seeks to test the efficacy of combining cash and services to improve nutrition and health outcomes for children and their households.

This report describes the conceptual framework and methodology for an impact evaluation of the ISNP intervention and presents findings from a baseline study. The baseline study confirms the low socio-economic status of PSNP households in the domains of housing conditions, sanitation, schooling, health seeking, food security, women’s agency, subjective wellbeing, sexual and reproductive health, access to social services, child nutrition and child protection. The PSNP clients are found to be generally worse off than the entirety of rural Amhara – confirming the targeting effectiveness of the PSNP. The study highlights the gaps that the ISNP interventions are meant to address and provides concrete action points for successful implementation.

This brief provides midline findings from the impact evaluation of a cash plus model targeting youth in households receiving the United Republic of Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN). Implemented by the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), with technical assistance of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS) and UNICEF Tanzania, the programme aims to improve livelihood opportunities and facilitate a safe transition to adulthood. The 'plus' component included training on livelihoods and sexual and reproductive health (SRH)-HIV, mentoring and productive grants, as well as linkages to youth-friendly health services. The impact evaluation is a longitudinal, mixed methods study. The midline analysis was conducted immediately after training (before mentoring, disbursement of productive grants and health facility strengthening).

“Ujana Salama” (‘Safe Youth’ in Swahili) is a cash plus programme targeting adolescents in households receiving the United Republic of Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN). Implemented by the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), with technical assistance of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS) and UNICEF Tanzania, the ‘plus’ component includes in-person training, mentoring, grants and health services. The impact evaluation studies the differential impact of the integrated programme (cash plus intervention targeting adolescents) with respect to the PSSN only. It is a mixed methods study, including baseline (2017), Round 2 (2018), Round 3 (2019) and Round 4 (2021) surveys. This brief summarizes findings from the Round 3 survey, which was conducted one year after the training, three months after the mentorship period, and one to two months after grant disbursement. The full report is available here.