Social Protection

Social protection is an emerging field of interest in development policy, as a core element of the objective to halve world poverty by 2015. Recent work at IDS (Sussex) has helped to refine what we understand as social protection – here, we conceive it quite broadly to refer to all measures that assist individuals, households, and communities to better manage the income and other risks that create and perpetuate vulnerability. This definition moves away from the traditional safety-nets agenda of the late 1980s and early 1990s that focused primarily on social assistance and welfare programmes, to include preventive and promotive intiatives that constitute ‘springboards’ out of poverty and into productive livelihoods. Social protection can include risk management actions taken by migrants and migrants’ families themselves and services and measures provided by the state, NGOs and other organisations.

The link between migration and social protection is twofold. First, migration is often in itself a social protection measure – in other words, members of poor households may migrate in response to low incomes, food insecurity or external shocks in order to protect the household. However, in addition, migration may also create new social protection needs for those who migrate and for those who are left behind.

To date, the Centre has undertaken some pilot research in Ghana with migrant workers in the country’s pineapple-growing sector, as well as in-depth research in Bangladesh and India (see Internal Migration). Building on this, a major new piece of empirical work is planned for 2006-07, which will look comparatively at the social protection mechanisms developed by internal migrants in Ghana, and Ghanaians working abroad in Nigeria and the UK. This will be linked to a set of other regional case studies funded by the World Bank and DFID. This will enable a comparative study to be set up that will focus on Malawians in South Africa and the UK.