The coverage (% of the population included in the information system), relevance (amount/type of data they store), and accessibility (e.g. level of interoperability/data sharing across the government data ecosystem) of these administrative data systems has also been increasing in many countries2 – posing important opportunities and challenges to policy-makers. The question is how to develop these systems in a way that is inclusive and right-based, leveraging technology “to ensure a higher standard of living for the vulnerable and disadvantaged” (Alston, 2019) rather than becoming a further barrier to inclusion. To illustrate the point this paper specifically focuses on gender and disability inclusion, while acknowledging similar considerations apply to all other forms of (intersectional) exclusion.

This report is available to download from the SPACE website here.

It also considers the potential for social protection to support gender-sensitive improvements in water security, including by enhancing women’s and girls’ access to water and by increasing their capacity to manage water-related risks.

The paper argues that the linkages between social protection, water and gender concerns are more substantial than previously recognised, and that they will only become stronger as the effects of climate change and urbanisation intensify.

Failure to explicitly acknowledge and address these linkages could hinder progress across the board, while better cross-sectoral understanding and action promises to generate more sustainable improvements in each sector and help lay the foundations for broader empowerment gains.

An infographic is also available, highlighting how social protection can promote improvements in water security.

The SASPp aims to increase access to adaptive social protection systems for poor and vulnerable populations to help them anticipate, absorb, and recover from covariate climate shocks and stresses (such as drought and flooding), and to support national social protection systems to become more adaptive and responsive to shocks and stresses (World Bank, 2019).

With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) this report sought to assess the gender-sensitivity  of the SASPp, including the extent to which the SASPp considers the differential needs and impact of programme activities on women and men, girls and boys, and uses this information to inform programme design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.

The following steps were followed to conduct this assessment and provide robust evidence-based recommendations for the SASPp programme team to take forward:

1. A literature review on gendered vulnerabilities and gender dimensions of adaptive social protection systems and what works to ensure they are gender-responsive and transformative.
2. A review of programme documentation to assess the gender-sensitivity in SASP’s design and implementation, including assessing how gender is considered across the programme, and what types of activities are tailored to respond to differential needs of women and men.
3. Key Informant Interviews with staff from the World Bank at headquarters and in-country and national stakeholders of the programme.

You can download the report by clicking the green button, and a presentation is also available here.

Nepal is in the midst of a demographic shift. Over the past three decades, its fertility rate has declined and population growth has stalled. The country has quickly moved from a high-mortality, high-fertility society to a low-mortality, low-fertility society. Although this shift is an encouraging indicator of development, the changing demography means new challenges for the people and their government as Nepal navigates a rapid transition to an “aging” and then an “aged” society (defined as more than 14 percent of the population being 65 years and older).

This aging population remains vulnerable to natural disasters, public health emergencies, and poverty—45 percent of households earn less than $2 a day.

DAI Global Health recently analysed the equitability and inclusivity of the existing social protection system in Nepal to inform the U.K. Department for International Development’s (DFID) Resilience and Inclusion for Nepal (RI4N) Programme. Applying a gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) lens to Nepal’s Social Security Allowance scheme—which comprises old age allowance, single women’s allowance, disability allowance, endangered ethnicity allowance, and the child grant—the report’s authors, Rebecca Holmes, Chhaya Jha, and Suravi Bhandary, identify key aspects of the scheme that must be addressed to ensure that social protection in Nepal reduces economic instability, achieves stability, and builds resilience.

Download the full report here.

Current Scope of Social Security Allowance

Some Social Security Allowance programmes in Nepal are supporting vulnerable and excluded groups to meet their basic needs. In particular, the engagement of women and girls provides them with indirect benefits such as greater mobility, access to public and private institutions, and more financial inclusion.

However, the current programmes were not designed with a gender-inclusive lens. They lack explicit objectives on how to meet the needs of women and girls in particular, focusing instead on the betterment of “vulnerable” groups more broadly.

“Our interviews highlighted three key reasons women and girls may face higher levels of exclusion from the schemes,” write the authors. “First, women face particular barriers in terms of their awareness of the schemes. … Dalits and other marginalised ethnic groups do not have access to the necessary information, may not speak Nepali, may not be allowed access to public spaces, or live in more remote areas. Second, women and girls have lower birth registration rates and face challenges in obtaining correct citizenship or marriage documentation. … [due to] early marriage and inter-caste marriages. And third, women and girls face more acute mobility constraints to enroll in the schemes.”

Shifting the allowance from manual cash payments to the formal banking system has been seen as an opportunity to improve the financial inclusion of women in Nepal. However, lower levels of literacy among women, the special circumstances of disabled women and of women from lower castes in particular, and the generally low familiarity with banking institutions all pose barriers. Mothers with small children, the elderly—who may be physically unable to get into bank buildings—and people burdened with other time-consuming domestic tasks also have difficulty accessing financial institutions.

The authors discovered that 20 percent more men receive the country’s disability allowance compared with women, and a higher percentage of male recipients of the Child Grant (52 percent going to boys compared to 48 percent to girls). There are complex reasons for this disparity bound in the social norms of Nepal and in the management of the Social Security Allowance. For example, poor coordination of schemes leading to fragmentation, the use of disaggregated data in a systematic monitoring framework, and poor social mobilisation support for women and girls.

Recommendations for Reform

To address current gaps in Nepal’s Social Security Allowance programmes and promote a more equitable and inclusive social protection system, the authors make several recommendations:

1. Invest in robust policies for an inclusive and equitable system, taking prompt action at national and local levels. The Government of Nepal should integrate GESI considerations into the Social Security Allowance programmes, with technical support from DFID and its development partners to build capacity on GESI and social protection, including support to government bodies such as the Ministry of Finance, Department of National Identity and Civil Registration, and Ministry of Home Affairs.

DFID and its partners should develop coordinated messaging on the value of integrating GESI objectives and considerations in social protection policy and programming.

The Government of Nepal can improve policy coherence among social protection programmes to address the intersecting vulnerabilities that people face; for example, allowing beneficiaries of disability grants to receive other grants that may be applicable to their circumstances.

Locally, we recommend the launch of knowledge-sharing activities that will create opportunities for skills training on GESI. Grassroots and civil society organisations representing women and girls have a key role to play in raising awareness and advocating for the rights of marginalised and vulnerable groups, which will in turn bring the social protection dialogue to the national stage.

2. Increase coverage and improve access to social protection for women and girls. Local governments must address the exclusion faced by women, particularly women with disabilities, and collaborate with civil society groups to reach the most marginalised women in their communities. The government should help women get documentation that will enable registration for social services—particularly for groups with low levels of literacy or for non-Nepali speakers. DFID and its partners can assist by ensuring that gender-specific banking solutions are available to women.

3. Build an evidence base on GESI and social protection to inform social protection policy. If Nepal is to understand the extent of women and girls’ exclusion from assistance programmes, it needs a comprehensive evidence base. Putting this together will entail reviewing the existing government database and ensuring that information systems capture relevant indicators, are robust, and are publicly available so they may be utilised in research studies. Assessing the existing data will enable stakeholders to grasp the extent of exclusion, measure the impact of the schemes on women and girls, and inform adaptive programming in Nepal.

DFID and partners can support the government in developing GESI indicators that will enable Nepal’s monitoring and management information systems to better capture the experience of beneficiaries.

4. Identify opportunities for social protection to maximise progress in equality, women and girls’ empowerment, and social inclusion. Cash transfers have the potential to transform the lives of women and girls. To realize this promise, the government should, among other things, establish referral mechanisms that help women with less mobility access services, and alert existing beneficiaries to other services relevant to them.

5. Provide services and programmes in addition to cash transfers. It may be feasible to collaborate with existing organisations to establish a “cash-plus” system focused on empowering women and girls. The idea would be to complement the cash allowance system with assistance such as skills and knowledge training, economic opportunities, and facilitated networking—among women’s groups, for example. Technical assistance might encompass resilience-building activities such as climate-smart agriculture, disaster preparation, and protection interventions for at-risk populations.

A gender-responsive and inclusive social protection system can have significant positive impacts on gender equality, and women’s and girls’ empowerment and opportunities, as well as strengthening state-citizen relations and promoting an inclusive and equitable society, the authors write. For such gains to be realised, the way in which social protection programmes and systems are designed and implemented are crucial. Programmes with explicit objectives to address gender inequality and support women and girls’ empowerment—and which are matched by investment in implementation—have positive effects. Addressing the gaps and challenges above would support the goals of DFID, the Government of Nepal, and its other development partners, in tackling social and economic exclusion, to deliver constitutional rights of social protection, and build a stronger and more equitable social protection system.

To read more about the key findings and policy recommendations, download the full report here.

Elo Otobo is a Project Manager for DAI Global Health.

How can Nepal best transform its largely cash transfer-based Social Security System to be more inclusive, effective, equitable, and affordable?

DAI recently analysed the equitability and inclusivity of the existing social protection system in Nepal, for the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) in Nepal.

The report’s authors highlight key findings on social protection in Nepal and provide policy recommendations to ensure that the implementation of a new programme to transform the social protection system in Nepal can effectively tackle issues of social and economic exclusion, serving the most marginalised in society and adhering to DFID’s objectives of leaving no one behind.

This analysis applied a gender equality and social inclusion lens to Nepal’s Social Security Allowance Schemes, comprising of old age allowance, single women’s allowance, disability allowance, endangered ethnicity allowance, and the child grant.

To read more about the key findings, download the report below.

In January 2020, a gender and disability workshop was held at IDS as part of the Inclusion Works and Disability Inclusive Development programmes. The aim was to strengthen the inclusion of gender mainstreaming within the disability programmes through raising awareness of gender concepts and issues and the intersection with disability and cultural factors.

The workshop provided an opportunity to share learning, experience and perspectives with the aim of strengthening the capacity of participants to apply gender mainstreaming approaches within their disability-focused programmes.

What are the challenges?

I was part of the group tasked with considering research, data and learning. We reached consensus that there are three main challenges to gender and disability inclusive programming for this theme.

Firstly, there are supply and demand side challenges with regards to evidence. Despite various commitments and frameworks, demand from donors and non-government organisations for data on gender and disability is currently lacking.

Work by Development Initiatives recently found that 0.1% of all international aid has been allocated to projects with a primary disability component. Where funds do exist for gender and disability programmes, there is often limited budget available for evidence generation.

At the same time, on the supply side, evidence on the intersection of gender, disability, and development is severely lacking. This makes it harder to understand what is going on and build the case for future programmes.

Secondly, human resource capacity to undertake global development research on gender and disability is currently limited. As highlighted in this recent essay on inclusive higher education, if researchers with disabilities are not included in research processes, the voices of people with disabilities are more likely to be excluded from outputs, recommendations, and implications.

Thirdly, restrictive donor demands are not always practical or conducive to considering gender or disability. Practical demands of delivering development programmes may get in the way of considering these themes in a meaningful way.

Do opportunities exist for meaningful change?

Our group decided that despite the challenges, a number of opportunities exist which may change the development landscape with regards to disability and gender.

As a guiding principle, we agreed that gender and disability must be thought about as development programmes are being conceived. It is no good designing a fantastic programme and then trying to squeeze in efforts at inclusion later.

We agreed that it is up to us as stakeholders to challenge donors when their demands (particularly timetables and financial restrictions) are not conducive to considering gender and disability in a meaningful way. We need to open a dialogue with donors to ensure they are learning too.

We also agreed that when we do have data, we need to get it out there, sharing it as widely as possible. This was in line with the closing remarks made by Prof. Tom Shakespeare about disability inclusive research at the International Conference on Disability and Development held in November 2019. He simply urged people to “Publish the stuff!”.

We recognised that a more holistic view of evidence is needed in order to meaningfully address the challenges of disability and gender. The combination of both qualitative and quantitative approaches can enable this as the two can complement each other.

As Hetan Shah (Chief Executive of the British Academy) wrote in a recent article, without human insights, data and the hard sciences will not meet the challenges of the next decade. This is particularly significant for challenges involving gender, disability, development, and the intersection of these themes.

Finally, we need to think carefully about the capacity to improve evidence and data collection. Both Inclusion Works and Disability Inclusive Development have committed to building the capacity of Disabled People’s Organisations. This includes developing the capacity to improve evidence and data generation. Any capacity development in this area must be carried out in a meaningfully participatory and sustainable way.

The terms of reference (TOR) for this study required a “desk based literature review of existing gender sensitive public works and of the impacts of public works programmes on gender relations”. In particular, the review’s primary focus should be on “soft public works and on public works with strategies for developing women’s skills, capacity and opportunities to enter the labour market and find sustainable employment or income generation in the future”.

This study is therefore organised as follows. The report starts by providing insights on the main barriers and lifecycle risks faced by (young) women accessing the labour market. It then focus on the potential role of public works in addressing these barriers, illustrating the Conceptual Framework that informs this study. The following section then delves into the three main ‘channels’ through which public works impact on women and girls can be enhanced, alongside a fourth – cross-cutting – institutional channel. Evidence from across a wide range of countries is provided, including insights on impacts achieved and mediating design and implementation factors. Particular depth – including light-touch ‘case studies’ is provided for public works that align with the overall objectives above. A final section draws broad conclusions.

The main contributions of this review include: an innovative Framework, providing a useful framing for future discussion on this topic; a focus on service-oriented public works and innovative forms of programming for skills enhancement.

This report is a scoping study of the potential for gender-sensitive public works in Mozambique, in particular in relation to the Productive Social Action Programme (PASP). This scoping study draws on the global literature review and includes analysis of political economy issues affecting the effectiveness of PASP and identifies potential areas for investment in gender-sensitive public works in Mozambique including, if relevant, the proposal of approaches to be piloted.

This report will contribute to planning DFID’s investments in social protection in Mozambique and will also be used to inform the work of the DFID-financed MUVA programme, which is an innovative adaptive programme that pilots different approaches to support women’s economic empowerment in Mozambique.

This paper moves beyond discussions around technical policy design and implementation features to understand the political economy factors that either support or hinder a gendered approach, and to identify entry points for action. It explores the factors that affect decisions around resource allocation, legal change and policy formulation using Rosendorff’s ‘three Is’: the institutions (formal and informal), the interests of key actors, and the ideas framing social protection strategies and programmes.

We find that progress in advancing gender-responsive social protection is more likely where:

1. there is a combination of pro-poor and inclusive national government institutions and influential political elites championing gender-responsive social protection
2. advocates influence informal decision-making arenas and sub-national political institutions
3. there is a broad coalition of skilled and resourced actors
4. the framing of social protection goes beyond seeing women as mothers and carers and instead as recipients of social protection in their own right.

An infographic is also available, highlighting how to build gender-responsive social protection systems.

The WASH programme provides up to £164.8 million over a seven-year period (2013 – 2020) to increase the availability of sustainable WASH services in the DRC. The programme consists of four pillars that together aim to deliver quality, scale and sustainability of WASH sector results in DRC:

1. Creating community incentives to deliver individual lasting behaviour change;
2. Increasing affordable access to WASH education;
3. Strengthening systems of empowerment and accountability between the communities, service providers and local and provincial government structures; and
4. Improving the capacity of service providers, institutions, and communities to monitor, operate, maintain, and deliver WASH services, and improving the capacity of national government to coordinate, monitor, and set appropriate priorities in the WASH sector.

Based on the overall progress summarised in the main report, the details described in the subsequent sections and the project score calculator, the overall score for this annual review is an “A”.