Transformative Change through Social Protection?

A study of five social protection projects in South Asia has found they struggled to create transformative change, and were unable to tackle the persistent discrimination driving poverty and social exclusion.

The three-year study by the Overseas Development Institute analysed projects on life skills and livelihood training in Afghanistan, food and asset transfers and skills training in Bangladesh, health insurance in India, and cash transfers in Nepal.

It found the projects did have some positive impact on wellbeing – through reduced healthcare costs, improved food security and increased knowledge – but only achieved a small impact on the “drivers of social exclusion”. These drivers include social and gender norms, local power structures, discriminatory service delivery and poor governance.

Rather than monetary poverty, the mostly EU-funded study sought to measure the programmes’ effect on “the processes and dynamics that allow deprivation to arise and persist”. Social exclusion may affect groups denied access to health, education, the labour market and economic opportunities.

Nicholas Taylor, Head of Sector for Employment, Social Inclusion and Social Protection at EuropeAid, told capacity4dev that the classic “poverty reduction paradigm” of targeting the needy with cash transfers too often fails to address the underlying causes of poverty.

Programmes aiming to improve social inclusion try to help marginalised groups, such as women, people with disabilities and ethnic minorities, who are among the most disadvantaged members in many societies.

However, “it is not a given that social protection addresses social inclusion”, Mr Taylor said.

Rebecca Holmes, a Research Fellow in the Social Protection Programme at ODI and one of the study’s authors, said programme implementation can be affected by broader societal norms and attitudes, which contribute to social exclusion.

Infant patients gets a check up. India. Photo: © World Bank / Curt Carnemark

In India, for example, the study analysed the government’s Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) initiative to provide subsidised social health insurance to households below the poverty line. While the initiative has significantly improved health insurance coverage across the population previously excluded from such benefits, there are instances where “some Scheduled Caste and Muslim households reported that they faced particular types of discrimination in terms of the behaviour of the doctor, or they weren’t made aware of the type of programme benefits which they were entitled to,” Ms Holmes said. “These have implications for the way that people can benefit from the programme.”

The study identified other shortcomings.

In Nepal, cash transfers allowed beneficiaries to eat more nutritious food, but were not high enough to improve overall food security. In Afghanistan, most young women chose to learn new skills in tailoring, but this did not help them earn a living.   

“They actually used those skills more at the household level to make clothes for themselves and their family members, rather than to engage in the labour market,” Ms Holmes said.

And in southern Bangladesh another food security programme achieved its results indirectly.

“Even though it was a food transfer programme beneficiaries didn’t eat that food, because it wasn’t locally appropriate to what they were used to eating. So they sold the food and bought other nutritious food with it.”

Ms Holmes announced her findings and recommendations, including that social protection be part of a broader framework for addressing social inclusion in partner countries, at the Brussels INFOPOINT last month.

Another panellist, Elke Kasmann, Senior Advisor of the Social Protection Team at the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ), responded: “I think the recommendations nurture our common illusion that we have big leverage to have a big influence on social and political changes in the partner countries we are working with.”

Ms Kasmann argued the social exclusion of certain groups was a product, in some cases, of centuries of discrimination, and so altering it would take time.

“It’s really a profound, broad societal and political change process, which of course can only come from inside our partner countries’ societies. And it will take time. Much more time than we allow in our project-cycle management style of planning.”

Speaking after the event, Ms Holmes agreed there are limits to what programmes can achieve amid broader societal constraints.

“Our recommendations clearly state that while careful design and implementation can help address some of the drivers of exclusion, social protection projects cannot solve all the problems at once (nor are they designed to).”

Ms Holmes said therefore that institutional links need to be created with other policies and programmes that address the drivers of social exclusion more effectively. 

Referring to the programme in Afghanistan, which sought to enable women to enter the labour market through skills training, Ms Holmes said young Afghan women may be discriminated against through household inequalities, with limited ability to move outside the house and earn their own living.

“These are some of the constraints which social protection itself or a labour market programme might not be able to overcome. But it definitely needs to be taken into consideration because it affects the outcome of these programmes.” 

This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Rebecca Holmes, Elke Kasmann and Nicholas Taylor with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team. Teaser image courtesy of U.S. Air Force (photo by Senior Airman Andrea Salazar).