Rationale
Social protection is the set of public and private policies and programmes aimed at preventing, reducing and eliminating economic and social vulnerabilities to poverty and deprivation. Increasing volatility at the macro and household level, persistence of inequalities and exclusion, threats posed to sustainable development by climate change, and changing population trends have heightened the relevance and political momentum for social protection worldwide. UNICEF is committed to social protection as part of its global mandate to advocate for the realization of children’s rights. Within UNICEF’s equity-focused approach to development, social protection is a crucial policy tool for achieving equity and social justice. The work on social protection is particularly relevant as poverty alleviation remains a key pillar of global development agenda in the post-2015/SDG framework, with Target 1.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals calling for the implementation of nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, including the achievement of substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable by 2030.
As an attempt to measure coverage of social protection programmes, a cross-sectoral team at UNICEF developed a draft Social Protection Module for household surveys, primarily for MICS, to measure coverage of key types of social transfers and programmes to enhance access to services, as defined in the 2012 UNICEF Social Protection Strategic Framework.
It is hoped that the module will also contribute to the ongoing discussions on the indicator on external economic support that has been included in the UNAIDS Global AIDS Progress Reporting (GARPR) guidance.
Activities to-date
Field-tests in Kenya and Zimbabwe
In collaboration with UNICEF’s East and Southern Africa Regional Office as well as with the Kenya and Zimbabwe Country Offices and the national statistical offices and social welfare ministries, the draft Social Protection Module was customized and field-tested among selected households that are recipients of social transfers in selected counties/districts in Kenya and in Zimbabwe (2014-2015) in a ‘stand-alone approach’ in order to accumulate experiences and evidence on country customization and to inform the development of a standardized module to be used in national population-based surveys. Experiences on customization and field implementation of the module at the country level were documented with key findings and recommendations. The findings and recommendations informed the proposed set of indicators to measure social protection programme coverage, which are aligned to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1: End poverty in all its form everywhere; and contribute to the measurement of the indicator under Target 3: Percentage of population covered by social protection floors/systems, disaggregated by sex and distinguishing children, the unemployed, old-age persons, persons with disabilities, pregnant women/newborns, work injury victims, the poor and the vulnerable. Further details on these experiences are available in separate reports for Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Field-tests in Viet Nam and Belize
The draft Social Protection Module was customized and field-tested among randomly selected households in three selected communes in Quang Nam Province of Viet Nam in a ‘stand-alone approach’ in collaboration with UNICEF’s East Asia and the Pacific Regional Office, UNICEF Viet Nam Country Office, the national statistics office and the offices of social affairs in December 2015. The province was selected given that it is one of the four focus provinces of the Social Assistance System Strengthening Programme (SASSP - the World Bank-supported national programme where considerable investments and UNICEF’s technical inputs are being made). The Viet Nam field-test also aimed at validating the survey results against data available from the administrative system on monthly social allowance and on electricity subsidy for the poor. A full description is available here. The results indicate that the module customized for Vietnam was of high sensitivity and specificity (i.e., responses from households that were administered the module matched fairly well with the data in the administrative system). The findings and recommendations informed the refinement of the draft social protection module, the draft tabulation plan, and decisions on the placement of questions in the survey tool. Around the same time, the module was included in the MICS6 Field-test in Belize. This was the first time that the module was included in a MICS setting. Results from the field test indicate that overall, understanding of the majority of the questions was high and recommendations on the improvement of specific questions were made. Further, given that many programmes are relatively small or focused on specific communities or groups of respondents, oversampling of households in a general population survey such as MICS may be needed to produce better estimates.
A consolidated paper describing the development is available as a methodological paper.
Future activities
The finalized version of the module was made available for the launch of MICS6. Data from the surveys using this module will be analyzed to understand patterns and how the module functions across-countries.