Strengthening social protection for children: West and Central Africa

This report seeks to provide an overview of existing social protection policy and programming initiatives in the West and Central Africa and to assess the extent to which these address the particular manifestations of childhood poverty and vulnerability that characterise different countries in the region. It highlights challenges in the design and implementation of child-sensitive social protection and offers a number of policy recommendations based on the analysis and lessons learned.

Recommendations for support to emerging social protection initiatives include:

• assistance in the scale-up and refinement of social protection programmes where they exist
• support for the operationalisation of national social protection strategies where these have been prepared or adopted
• encouragement and support to help translate the general commitments to social protection that appear in many poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) into social protection strategies and costed implementation plans for eventual programme design, operationalisation, monitoring and evaluation.

More broadly, the analysis concludes that governments and international development partners can take the following steps to develop and implement child-sensitive social protection:

• review existing social protection policies and programmes to ensure that they are child sensitive
• support priority setting and sequencing of policy development and implementation for the progressive realisation of a basic social protection package accessible to all those in need
• improve fiscal space so as to increase available resources
• enhance capacity and coordination at all levels, building awareness, political will, capacity and inter-sectoral synergies among a broad array of actors
• ensure balance and synergies between social protection and complementary services
• continue to build the evidence base on child-sensitive social protection through strengthened research, data disaggregation, monitoring and evaluation and knowledge management systems.