MENA Regional Event: Linking Social Protection & Humanitarian Cash Assistance

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated longstanding efforts to better link social protection and humanitarian CVA. The devastating economic impacts of the crisis have led governments worldwide to massively scale up social protection and, in turn, humanitarian actors are increasingly working alongside governments to support these national safety-nets.

But in many crisis-affected countries, social protection systems are weak and under-funded, with limited coverage. In others still, many of those worst-affected – migrants, refugees and other marginalised groups – are not included.

The CALP Network’s State of the World’s Cash report finds that more than half of practitioners agree that a lack of coordination between governments and humanitarian actors is holding back further progress.

In this online event, we brought together experts on this topic from across the region to address this gap and understand the experience and good practice that exists in the region. As well as key challenges from a multi-stakeholder perspective. The panel represented a diverse range of stakeholders and reflected on the issue from development, humanitarian, donor, government and national society perspectives.

We built on our previous work with key social protection stakeholders in the region. This intended to complement existing efforts and initiatives in the region and promote cross-learning in this critical area.

Event took place on 28 July 2020

Recordings

Part One

In this part of the event, we present highlights from the CALP Network’s:

(a) State of the World Cash 2020 Report (b) High-level Social Protection Paper (c) Country Case Studies on this topic from Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon

Part One

In this part of, you can listen to the panel discussion with panellists from DFID Yemen, National Aid Fund of Jordan, Lebanese Red Cross and the regional offices of UNICEF, World Bank and WFP to learn how cash actors in the region are working together to better link social protection and humanitarian cash in response to COVID-19.