Attachments
Author: Nicolas Diaz Castellanos
The World Food Programme in Western Africa continues supporting governments in their efforts to build social protection systems across the region, focusing on their ability to help people manage risks and shocks, while contributing to food security and improved nutrition.
This 2024 year-in-review news update provides key highlights from across the region, with WFP’s work on social protection sitting at the crossroads of social protection programme delivery, support to national systems, and seeking convergence points with partners for scaled-up coverage.
WFP’s approach to social protection
Social protection systems play a vital role on the road to achieving a Zero Hunger world. Effective and at-scale investments and interventions that address poverty and vulnerability can help the most vulnerable individuals and households better cope with the threats to their food security and nutrition, oftentimes driven by cycles of chronic poverty and vulnerability.
As such, social protection programmes provide support to people in need, helping them meet their basic needs without compromising the quantity and quality of their food intake, and without pushing them to last-resort coping mechanisms to meet these needs, such as taking children out of school, selling off their productive assets, depleting their savings or abandoning their lands altogether. Social protection is also vital to resilience building and, ultimately, lays the foundations for more prosperous and peaceful societies, where people can invest in their human capital and where communities enjoy a strong social fabric and social cohesion.
In doing so, social protection creates pathways to tackling some of the root causes of hunger and malnutrition. National social protection systems have the potential to improve the lives of billions of people, and in a more cost-efficient fashion than recurrent humanitarian response alone.
At WFP, we partner with governments and others to establish and strengthen national systems to maximize the impact of our technical and operational expertise in the most cost-effective way. Our global field presence and our history of reaching people in need in diverse and challenging contexts, including many communities living in conflict-afflicted areas or fragile settings, mean we can put at the service of governments a wealth of guidance and assistance to help safeguard food security and nutrition today and address underlying drivers of vulnerability, promoting resilience, human capital investments, and dignified livelihoods for all in the pursuit of Zero Hunger.
WFP’s strategy on social protection, therefore, builds on our crosscutting experience, offering a coordinating framework that outlines how we will systematically support efforts to achieve long-term national social protection goals, while continuing our work responding to hunger emergencies. It is informed by a range of operational and analytical evidence that illustrated how social protection activities help WFP deliver on its mandate and enable governments to meet their global commitments. We believe that effective social protection policies are a way to make a real and lasting difference for billions of the world’s most vulnerable people as we work together on saving lives and changing lives.
WFP also plays a role in supporting governments to strengthen the shock-responsive functions of social protection, working across systems, building on our expertise. In this role, working in strong partnership with governments as well as development partners and international financial institutions is key. Our vision in West Africa is to position social protection as a key investment case to support food security and nutrition, while also supporting governments in strengthening the intersectoral coordination and implementing the necessary policy and programme to achieve this objective. This translates into two main, interlinked priorities: (i) supporting the linkages between social protection and nutrition and (ii) embedding social protection in strategies to support a food security continuum (in structural and seasonal responses to food insecurity).
To implement these priorities, WFP supports the design and delivery of nationally led social protection systems, providing strategic and technical advice, and/or implementing programmes on governments’ behalf. In addition, WFP’s programmes ensure a complementarity with national social protection systems, which can also function in the absence of State-led services. For WFP, national social protection systems comprise 12 building blocks. Together, they represent the enabling environment that steers the wider systems architecture, the programmes that deliver services and support to those in need, and the-cutting processes of advocacy, knowledge and learning.