Social Safety Nets and Gender: Learning From Impact Evaluations and World Bank Projects

This review focuses on a core set of poverty reduction interventions: Social Safety Net (SSN) programs. SSNs, a subset of social protection programs, are noncontributory transfer programs. Their main objective is “protecting the poor against destitution and promoting equality of opportunity”. The need to integrate gender considerations into the design of SSNs (and social protection interventions more generally) is an explicit objective of the World Bank Social Protection (SP) strategy. It is incorrect to assume that policies designed to ameliorate household poverty are sufficient for the alleviation of individual poverty, and that individual poverty can be alleviated without due regard to household processes. Errors in understanding intra-family allocation processes may result in the non-adoption of beneficial policies, in policies having unintended consequences, and in the loss of policy handle. It is also part of the World Bank gender mainstreaming strategy—a priority of the institution.