Renewal Theme 2: AIDS, Community Resilience and Social Protection

1. Renewal Theme 2:AIDS, Community Resilience and Social Protection Michelle Adato Renewal/IFPRI Renewal 3 Workshop Randburg, South Africa 12-14 March, 2007

2. Outline of Presentation • Central issues • Framework for understanding social protection • Types of interventions • Social protection in the context of AIDS • Current status • R3 Research themes • Proposed projects

3. Central issues in this theme • How social protection needs to be rethought in the context of HIV and AIDS • Roles and partnerships between the State, communities, and NGOs • in maximizing resilience to AIDS through ensuring effective and reliable social protection

4. A Social Protection Framework Protective Preventative Promotional Transformational Secure basic consumption Reduce fluctuations in consumption and avert asset reduction Enable people to save, invest, and accumulate through reduction in risk and income variation • Build, diversify, and enhance use of assets • Reduce access constraints • Directly provide or loan assets • Build linkages with institutions • Transform institutions and relationships • Economic • Political • Social • Public works • Insurance • Conditional transfers • Unconditional cash or food transfer • Direct feeding • Subsidies • Livelihoods programs • Microcredit • Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition • Home-based care • Employment in care services • Child and adult education/skills

5. Types of interventions • Cash transfers • Food and nutrition transfers • Public works, employment and training • Maternal and child health and nutrition • Adult and children’s education and skills • Livelihoods and microcredit • Insurance • Subsidies

6. Social protection in the context of AIDS • HIV and AIDS pose serious challenges to already difficult issues of finance, design, administration, implementation, targeting, capacity, socio-cultural context, gender & other social relations, conflict, markets, politics, political economy, ethics • Bases for selecting among programs and design features may be irrelevant or incorrect • But how different?

7. Some examples • Cash transfers programs need urgent scaling up, but how to target? How to sustain them financially and politically? • Conditionalities need to be carefully considered • Whether they are appropriate • What to condition on • Job creation programs may need to focus on care services, ‘light,’ flexible, and home-based work, not hard labour • Microfinance may need different structures and rules with respect to group-based borrowing and repayment • Programs concerned with pre-natal nutrition by targeting pregnant mothers need to consider HIV and AIDS

8. Public works, employment and training • Jobs and skills • Social, physical, and productive infrastructure • Delivery of social services and care (e.g. home-based care; early childhood development) • Household contracts with flexible family labor to substitute where members weak or ill • Light work activities • Food aid to ill HHs for small home-based projects • Food, cash, agricultural inputs, where unable to work • Group formation for savings, livelihoods activities • Information and communication activities • Organizational dev, mobilization around HIV and AIDS

9. Current status • Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, interventions provide cash, food, clothing, livelihoods projects, labor-sharing, credit, and other assistance. • However, mostly ad hoc, small-scale, underfunded, and insecure—supported by NGOs, donors, CBOs or FBOs. • Important but do not represent a coherent social policy. • Some regional support for larger programs by international NGOs. • Some countries have more systematic cash transfer programs of varying reach, established or experimental. • Broader range of options underway, e.g. the National Plans of Action for Orphans and Vulnerable Children. • Important time for research

10. Broad research themes 1 • Cash and/or food/in-kind assistance? • Targeting AIDS and/or targeting poverty? • Conditional, unconditional, or ‘linked’? • Transfers or livelihoods support? • Single or multi-dimensional interventions • Local/flexible or standardized/large-scale? • Roles for government, NGOs, CBOs, agencies

11. Research themes 2 • What types of community change, innovation, adaptation, fragmentation and decline are in process? • What determines an effective community response? • How can these be scaled up and externally supported without undermining them?

12. Research themes 3 • Identify groups differently affected: • e.g. ill, pregnant, orphaned, elderly, family; neighbors, community workers, men, women, child-headed HHs, street children • Identify relevant interactions, e.g. gender and age; gender and CHH • Identify specific vulnerabilities and relevance to program design • Targeting: Reaching reach poor, AIDS-affected households • E.g. community-based, surveys, demographic, universal/geographic, • Without stigmatizing; equitably • Testing and comparing designs • Financing, administration, implementation, training, integration, benefit levels, fit with family and community norms

13. Research themes 4 • Impacts and indicators • Governance and policy processes • From sectoral compartmentalization, mismatched incentives, and institutional dissonance to partnerships and innovations • Capacity needs and development for scaling up • Sustaining political support

14. Proposed ‘Flagship’ Projects

15. National System of Social Transfers in Zambia • Under 5th National Development Plan: 200,000 households to receive predictable transfers • Ministry of Community Development and Social Services, Dept of Social Welfare, TWG on Social Assistance • Partners: GTZ, DFID, Care, Unicef, Irish Aid, WB • Testing in five pilot districts • By end of 2008, plan for piloting with 9000+ HHs • 72 districts by 2012

16. Zambia cash transfer study: Research issues • Targeting • Implementation structures: roles of govt, NGOs, CBOs • Cash only vs. cash + • Cash and/or food • Capacity needed for scaling up • Generating political support and other policy processes