Social Protection In Near East And North Africa Regional Trends

This publication presents a range of social protection programmes in the Near East and North Africa region, including government-led social assistance, food subsidies, contributory social security and insurance schemes, and systems based on religious and cultural traditions.

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This book presents a state of the art in the developing field of social policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It offers an up-to-date conceptual analysis of social policy programmes and discourses in the MENA region by critically reviewing the range of social insurance and social assistance schemes that are currently in existence there. It also analyses and offers suggestions on which of these policies can positively impact the region's advancement in terms of human development and in addressing social and economic inequalities and exclusion.

The document follows the agenda of the workshop. It starts with a background description of the situation that has lead to the organization of the technical event. It sets the scene presenting the FAO's strategy on Rural Poverty Reduction and on Social Protection. It starts then with the policy review and the national Priorities presenting the learnings from the Republic of Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The second part treats the expanding of Social Protection to Rural Areas, presenting the experiences from Leabnon and the expansion of universal health to rural areas. The second part also contains the big question of how financing Social Protection. The third part of the document presents Social Protection and its link with resilient Livelihoods and Climate Change while the last part contains evidence-based social protection cases from Latin America and the Arab region.

Social Protection Programs for Africa’s Drylands explores the role of social protection in promoting the well-being and prosperity of people living in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a specifi c focus on the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Based on a review of recent experience, it argues that social protection policies and programs have an important role in promoting the resilience of the people residing in these areas. Social protection programs, when well designed and carefully implemented at scale, can reduce vulnerability to droughts and other shocks and promote coping capacity. If present trends continue, by 2030 dryland regions of East and West Africa will be home to an estimated 429 million people, up to 24 percent of whom will be living in chronic poverty. Many others will depend on livelihood strategies that are sensitive to the shocks that will hit the region with increasing frequency and severity, making them vulnerable to falling into transient poverty. Social protection programs will be needed in the drylands to provide support to those unable to meet their basic needs. Some of these people will require long-term support, while others will require periodic short-term support because of income losses due to shocks (for example, crop failure following a drought) or as a result of lifecycle changes (for example, loss of a breadwinner). Safety net programs can increase resilience in the short term by improving coping capacity of vulnerable households. Rapidly scalable safety nets that provide cash, food, or other resources to shock-affected households can allow them to recover from unexpected shocks. Scaling up an existing safety net program can be far less expensive than relying on appeals for humanitarian assistance to meet urgent needs. Social protection programs can increase resilience over the longer term by reducing sensitivity to shocks of vulnerable households especially if combined with other development programs. Providing predictable support to chronically poor households and enabling them to invest in productive assets and access basic social services can effectively reduce these households’ sensitivity to future shocks, help them participate in the growth process, and take advantage of the investments made in agricultural and pastoralist activities proposed in the drylands.

This book reviews the effectiveness of poverty reduction and human development strategies in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since the mid-1980s. Issues discussed include: trends in inequality and income poverty, human development indicators in relation to regional comparisons and country-specific performance, links between education, health and poverty, gender dimensions, assistance programmes such as food and energy subsidies, public works and microfinance schemes. The report finds that although there was stagnation in the rate of poverty reduction during this period, health and education indicators improved substantially.

The Near East and North Africa (NENA) has always been affected and in many ways shaped by the high levels of human mobility. However, rural migration - or migration to, from and between rural areas - is often overlooked, despite its important ramifications for food security, agriculture, rural development and regional disparities. In the next decade, persistent poverty, climatic threats and increasing competition for natural resources may fuel greater levels of migration across NENA countries. This report was designed to provide policy makers, practitioners and development partners with an overview of the main challenges and opportunities of rural migration in the NENA region.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an economically diverse region. Despite undertaking economic reforms in many countries, and having considerable success in avoiding crises and achieving macroeconomic stability, the region’s economic performance in the past 30 years has been below potential. This paper takes stock of the region’s relatively weak performance, explores the reasons for this out come, and proposes an agenda for urgent reforms.

Quantifying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty in Africa has been as difficult as predicting the path of the pandemic, mainly due to data limitations. The advent of new data sources, including national accounts and phone survey data, provides an opportunity for a thorough reassessment of the impact of the pandemic and the subsequent expansion of social protection systems on the evolution of poverty in Africa. In this paper, we combine per capita GDP growth from national accounts with data from High-Frequency Phone Surveys for several countries to estimate the net impact of the pandemic on poverty. We find that the pandemic has increased poverty in Africa by 1.5-1.7 percentage points in 2020, relatively smaller than early estimates and projections. We also find that countries affected by Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) experienced the greatest increases in poverty, about 2.1 percentage points in 2020. Furthermore, we assess and synthesize empirical evidence on the role that social protection systems played in mitigating the adverse impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Africa. We review social protection responses in various African countries, mainly focusing on the impact of these programs and effectiveness of targeting systems. Although the evidence base on the protective role of social protection programs during the pandemic remains scarce, we highlight important findings on the impacts of these programs while also uncovering some vulnerabilities in social protection programming in Africa. We finally draw important lessons related to the delivery, targeting and impact of various social protection programs launched in Africa in response to the pandemic.