Resilience, equity and opportunity: the World Bank’s social protection and labor strategy 2012–2022

This paper is an overview of the World Bank’s strategy on social protection and labour. It argues that social protection and labour systems, programmes and policies buffer individuals from shocks and equip them to improve their livelihoods and create opportunities to build a better life for themselves and their families. The paper claims that social protection and labour policies and programmes contribute to growth by building and protecting human capital, providing the security to invest in higher-risk higher-return activities, promoting greater labour market mobility, stabilising aggregate demand, enhancing productive assets and infrastructure, reducing inequality in society and making growth enhancing reforms more politically feasible.

The social protection strategy is guided by overarching goals, a clear strategic direction and engagement principles. The overarching goals of the strategy are to improve resilience, equity and opportunities for people in both low and middle income countries. The strategic direction is to help developing countries move from fragmented approaches to more harmonised systems for social protection and labour. The engagement principles for working with clients should be tailored according to the country, evidence-based in operations and knowledge work and collaborative across a range of sectors and actors.

The strategy makes the following recommendations.

• Developing countries and their partners need to recognise and mitigate political and institutional risks and prioritise social protection and labour.
• A systems-oriented approach to social protection and labour programmes must be created to strengthen coordination and integration at the policy, programme and administrative levels and adapted to different country contexts.