Overview
Global policymakers confront urgent challenges to enhance the lives of 700 million people in extreme poverty and tackle issues like climate change, fragility, and gender empowerment. Additionally, over the next decade, 1.1 billion young individuals in low and middle-income nations will enter the workforce. Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) policies are vital for hastening poverty reduction, reducing food insecurity, improving employment prospects, and advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Themes
The Development Impact Group’s Social Protection and Jobs program aims to identify the most impactful and scalable policies to address these global challenges. It spans the most common Social Protection and Jobs policies and instruments across four inter-linked areas:
Cash Transfers and Public Works
The Development Impact Group conducts original policy research and compiles evidence summaries on cash transfers and public works, which are the most common social protection programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). For instance, cash transfer programs have been shown to have relatively persistent effects, while public works have positive effects on beneficiaries' employment and earnings in the short-term that tend to fade in the medium run.
Adaptive Social Protection and Climate Resilience
The Development Impact Group studies how to increase household resilience before climatic shocks, including in FCV settings. Research shows that interventions that promote livelihood diversification or land recuperation to raise agricultural productivity can help households mitigate the effects of future climatic shocks. The Development Impact group has also analyzed how to optimize response to shocks. Anticipatory action for floods in Nepal or shock-responsive cash transfers for drought in Niger have led to faster impacts on food security compared to regular post-disaster assistance after climatic shocks.
Economic Inclusion Programs
The Development Impact Group analyzes how multifaceted economic inclusion (or graduation) programs designed to address multiple constraints improve poor households’ livelihoods, income, food security, resilience and women’s empowerment. Findings from Afghanistan, Niger, or the Sahel show that economic inclusion programs are high-return investments and induce sustained impacts, including when delivered through government systems and across rural, urban, and fragile settings. The Development Impact Group is assessing how to effectively scale these programs through an impact collaborative with the Partnership for Economic Inclusion.
Jobs for the Poor
The Development Impact Group assesses how to improve employment prospects in formal wage jobs and SMEs, in off-farm activities and informal micro-enterprises, and in agriculture, with a focus on women, people in poverty and vulnerable individuals. For instance, ongoing work shows that dual apprenticeships are attractive for youths and help firms fill open positions, and they induce medium to long-term impacts on youth earnings. Findings from economic inclusion programs show large effects on women’s labor force participation and micro-enterprise revenues. School-feeding interventions involving the transition from a centralized meal production model to locally procured meals in poverty pockets in Jordan increased women’s employment, income, savings, and non-food expenditures.
Partnerships
The Development Impact Group works in close collaboration with the World Bank Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice (GP), including on key initiatives such as the Partnership for Economic Inclusion (PEI) and the Sahel Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) Program, the World Food Programme (WFP), government counterparts, and a wide variety of technical partners. DIME also leverages cross-sectoral synergies with other Development Impact Goup programs on gender, fragility (crime, conflict, and violence), education, private sector development, and agriculture, in collaboration with partner GPs.
