Fleur Wouterse, SRF IFPRI Africa Office

1. Day 2: Concluding remarks
Fleur Wouterse, SRF IFPRI Africa Office

2. Key questions
• How can social protection programs be designed and targeted
to allow countries to effectively and efficiently meet their
growing needs?
• What factors determine success, costs, and sustainability of
those currently being implemented?
• How can incompatible considerations driving the social
protection agenda be reconciled and how can the agenda itself
be adapted to the individual country context?

3. 1. Social protection can contribute to
agricultural (and economic) growth
• Social protection has three objectives - the three P’s of social
protection: protection through consumption smoothing,
prevention and livelihood promotion.
• By addressing constraints on household decision-making, social
protection programs can enhance agricultural production and
productivity.
• Emphasizing the livelihood promotion role of social protection is
key for building coalitions between ministries charged with
social protection and of agriculture in support of social
protection funding.

4. 2. Universal targeting may be preferable
• When the asset distribution is flat (“we are all poor here”),
universal targeting at a localized level may be preferred.
• Universal targeting will reduce the costs of deciding which
combination of targeting mechanisms will work best, if at all;
• Minimize exclusion errors
• Reduce the social tensions
• and be a more ethical solution in the context of local
development.

5. 3. Graduation requires additional support
• Graduation—reducing vulnerability to the point where people can
move off social protection provision—is closely linked with overall
budget considerations.
• To graduate, households often need additional support that is not
part of the basic cash transfer program.
• Cash+ approaches, foster a more skilled workforce capable of
responding to changing demand and joining the transition to higher
levels of productivity.
• Graduation programs, a subset of Cash+ programs, have been
shown to outperform cash transfers and livelihood development
programs in terms of their long-term impact on the extreme poor

6. 4. A one-size-fits-all social protection program
is unlikely to work
• Heterogeneity in household type, in location, and in population
group means that a one-size-fits-all social protection program is
unlikely to work, especially in targeting eligible households, and
in identifying those able to exit or graduate from a program
• . A “leave-no-one-behind” agenda requires that a social
protection policy seek to coordinate and deliver the appropriate
combination of interventions to different population groups in
different contexts.

7. 5. Context-relevant initiatives evolving out of
domestic agendas are more likely to succeed
• The long-term success of social protection programs depends
on the strength of local and national political systems.
• Mobilizing the population to claim rights or entitlements from the
state is an essential complement to technocratic approaches to
social protection.
• To ensure long-term sustainability, it is imperative that domestic
tax collection systems are strengthened, and their efficiency
improved.