Social Protection in the Afghan Context

project summary

There is an emerging consensus around the view that social protection provides an effective response to poverty and vulnerability in developing countries. This finding is expressed in the growing number of national governments adopting social protection strategies. More recently social protection as a sector strategy in the context of fragile states has appeared. Social protection has been introduced as a sector in the Afghanistan National Development Strategy. Yet, it is unclear what effect such a sector strategy has in Afghanistan and to what extent the sector covers the needs of the poor and how well coordinated donors and the Afghan government are when social protection activities are implemented. It is on the other hand known that even when the donor community agrees on key policy objectives, there is often a lack of consistency in how they are applied in practice. Moreover, as broad policy objectives are pushed down the aid chain by donors, they often encounter resistance. The overall objective of this research project is to look at effectiveness of the social protection strategy in Afghanistan or in other words to see if the social protection strategy responds to the needs of poor people in Afghanistan. In order to do this questions are pursued on two levels. One level is concerning the overall question of how donor coherence within the social protection strategy plays out. The other level is on how responsive to needs actual social protection activities are.