Gendering Social Protection

In 2018, Carolina Sánchez-Páramo and Ana Maria Munoz-Boudet noted that, statistically, for every 100 men within the age cohort of 25-34 years, 122 women within the same cohort are likely to suffer household poverty—as a result of childbearing and rearing, unpaid care, educational deficit, as well as skill and income disparity. The consequence of this is that women hold the peak position in the global population of the extreme poor.

As a remedy to the above situation, social protection programmes and policies, therefore, have become the go-to poverty reduction and inclusive development tools that are used to address these identified development failures and, in line with the SDGs, to help close these inequality gaps. Though developed and popularized by the global north, over the years, ‘social protection’ has become a prominent feature in the social and development affairs of the global south and middle and low-income countries. A 2015 World Bank report, The State of Social Safety Net, noted that 131 out of 157 countries have at least one form of social protection programme, while cash transfer—key components of social assistance under social protection which can be conditional or non-conditional—alone are present in 130 countries, with Africa harbouring 40 of the implementing countries. The popularity of cash transfers among countries came to be due to the efficacy attributed to addressing poverty and inequality over the years. From two countries in 1997 to 27 countries in 2008; as of 2010, cash transfer was present in 63 countries.