Social protection and COVID-19 – the emerging story of what worked where… and what it all means for future crises

Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up.

COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often dismissed before the pandemic (‘it is primarily for the poor and does not really concern us’), social protection became recognised as a crucial tool to cushion its socio-economic impacts (‘we are only a job-loss away from needing support’). As us geeks like to cite, “between March 2020 and May 2021 a total of 3,333 social protection measures had been planned or implemented in 222 countries”.