A friend writes;
Do you know any good, short reads on “social safety nets”?I second all of that. So - any suggestions?
The context for this is that the South Sudan oil shut-down made all the donors panic and want to divert lots of development programming back to humanitarian programming. All of the advice to the government in response has been to continue to focus on building government systems so that they are stronger and more funds can flow through them when the oil is turned back on.
I think there can and should be a stronger response on the humanitarian side as well, that is institutionalised. Every year, there are going to be parts of South Sudan that are food insecure, even if just due to bad rains or floods. So we need a sustainable system that can address these needs, and to ensure households don’t become chronically food insecure, not the current system of panicked international fund-raising and dumping tonnes of food aid on the problem every year.
So do you know a good, short briefing paper that summarises country experiences and evidence on these sorts of programmes?
5 comments:
Since a lot of the cyclical hunger issues are similar in the Sahel, there should be something useful.... 'Escaping the Hunger Cycle: Pathways to Resilience in the Sahel' isn't short but mightn't be a bad place to start.
Thanks Laura. The "key recommendations" look a little like the kitchen sink....
Indeed. I actually spent a lot of the last month downloading stuff about this to read on leave prior to moving to Mali properly next month (you know you're super cool when...) so if anything jumps out as useful while I'm trawling through it I'll let you know
Here's one that's a bit shorter, and is drawn from next door in Ethiopia. I like this briefing for its analysis of some trade-offs involved in implementing Ethiopia's current safety net approach: "productive safety nets." And the author, Stephen Devereux, is (to the best of my knowledge) the pre-eminent researcher on safety nets and related development policies in Ethiopia.
http://www.fao.org/es/ESA/pdf/workshop_0108_ethiopia.pdf
I have read the Devereux brief and a more macro one, located at http://www.ilo.org/employment/Whatwedo/Publications/WCMS_120741/lang--en/index.htm. There are several others (which I have not read) are available on the CaLP website at http://www.cashlearning.org/resources keyword: safety net. Of course, there's also the World Bank collection found here: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALPROTECTION/EXTSAFETYNETSANDTRANSFERS/0,,menuPK:282766~pagePK:149018~piPK:149093~theSitePK:282761,00.html
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