COVID-19 and the rise of 'adaptive social protection'

The concept of “adaptive social protection” is less than a decade old, but its impact is beginning to be felt across the Sahel. The African region faces frequent disasters, such as droughts and floods, that contribute to mounting insecurity. ASP aims to help communities prepare for and curb the most severe effects of those emergencies and other impacts of climate change. One major initiative — the World Bank's Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program — has received $168.8 million in donor funds since 2014, according to the bank, to develop and leverage social protection programs for this purpose. While the concept was already attracting attention and investments, the international organizations behind ASP say the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored its potential. "COVID was a big wake-up call," said Christian Bodewig, a human development economist at the World Bank who manages SASPP. "Some major thing can happen that can have huge ramifications. We need scalable systems to help address the impacts on the poor." Working to build on that momentum, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development hosted seven workshops earlier this year with participants from the World Bank, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme, which are all involved in SASPP or other ASP efforts in five Sahel countries: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. It is the beginning of a process to encourage closer collaboration between the agencies on ASP efforts that might ultimately serve as a model for the rest of the world. The evolution of ASP ASP is based on the idea that social protection programs — such as cash transfers or social insurance — could help communities prepare for, cope with, and adapt to disasters and the effects of climate change. "We had this momentum toward the expansion of social protection," said Soenke Kreft, executive director at the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, a think tank. "The logical consequence of this is how can this be done in a way to better manage the long-term trends and risks that exist." “We need to think, during this recovery, about how we can build more resilient systems and strengthen the underlying ones.” --— Christian Bodewig, SASPP program manager, World Bank In the first phase of SASSP, which ran through 2019, tens of thousands of households in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal gained access to cash transfer programs. The project was implemented by the governments and administered through a multidonor trust fund with financing from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, among others. It also fostered the development of inclusion programs, such as savings groups and training, so people could diversify their work options. The hope is that these social safety nets can help people avoid steps such as selling livestock or taking children out of school when disaster strikes, which could ultimately drive them further into poverty. Instead, they might be able to draw on larger cash transfers or pivot to another way of making money. ASP also recognizes the limitations of the humanitarian sector in responding to persistent shocks. "The Sahel region faces multiple challenges, including high poverty rates and regular crises. Therefore, it lends itself to ASP," said Maren Suchta-Platzmann, an adviser on social protection at the German Corporation for International Cooperation, or GIZ. GIZ helped organize the recent workshops on the Sahel countries, a region where Germany has invested in multiple ASP efforts. While ASP was initially conceived around climate-related events, COVID-19 has signaled its applicability to other kinds of disasters. In Niger, the government was able to rapidly expand its cash transfer program from 30,000 households to more than 400,000 during the crisis, Bodewig said. Chad’s government was also able to capitalize on social protection programs in its capital city during the lockdown, although expansion efforts in response to COVID-19 were limited by financial considerations. The next stage ASP programs are not quick to implement, either. Designed to be both farsighted and far-reaching, they require collaboration between governments, aid and development organizations, data systems, and financing institutions. One of SASSP's signal accomplishments in its initial five-year phase was helping countries create social registries so that citizens are documented and can be reached with services. That’s how Niger was able to expand its cash transfer program so quickly, Bodewig said. Though the initial registration process had focused largely on poor and rural areas, the systems were in place to begin counting other communities when it became clear that COVID-19 would also take a significant toll on urban populations. "We need to think, during this recovery, about how we can build more resilient systems and strengthen the underlying ones," he said. "The stronger your systems are, the more you can reach people." Organizations and ministries must work with communities to identify perceived risks and then think about the datasets — from weather forecasting technology, for example — that can help predict those emergencies. This must then be tied to social protection efforts that can help communities prepare for those emergencies. That requires funding, whether in the form of cash transfers — which might be paid for by development actors — or insurance products that governments can tap into during an emergency. "What shows whether this is making real progress is if you can structure financing mechanisms and set up this type of data-sharing arrangement," Kreft said. "This will be [the] real implementation." But Kreft cautioned that, as a relatively new approach, ASP is still being elaborated and challenges are emerging. In Indonesia, where the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative is working on an ASP program led by GIZ, he said there was a surprising early challenge in just reaching a consensus with communities about what constitutes risk. In the recent workshops, participants working in the Sahel also highlighted challenges in coordinating a common database and in building partnerships, particularly with governments. "Social protection is very often not high up on the agenda of national governments," Suchta-Platzmann said. But Bodewig said COVID-19 should send it climbing. For SASPP, which was just at the start of its second phase when the pandemic began, he said there is an opportunity to take advantage of the COVID-19 response to strengthen systems and ties that will ultimately improve ASP. The next two years should offer an opportunity to use the available resources to draw more people into protection programs and to expand the services they offer. "We can really leverage the growing attention and resources that are there to strengthen these systems," Bodewig said.