More evidence, less poverty

RECOVR Roundup Newsletter

Social Protection in the Time of COVID-19

This will be our last edition, so we’re looking back at our 37 previous Roundups. We featured results and analyses from over 200 studies, books, and articles plus links to news and resources covering advances in social protection during the pandemic.

Below are some links we've found particularly interesting:

Vaccine access in developing countries remains highly inequitable, and distribution to maximize global coverage needs to be improved. In a 2021 Nature Medicine paper, IPA researchers were part of a large consortium that was among the first to get real vaccine attitude data from lower-income countries and found higher acceptance rates than in the higher-income countries studied.
There’s been a lot of movement worldwide around cash transfers as stimulus measures and to cushion the pandemic’s economic impacts. We highlighted studies from Colombia where they helped without disincentivizing work; Kenya, where a basic income buffered against hunger and other hardships; the Philippines, where customers got their cash, but largely didn’t know they could use new digital bank accounts created for them; and more.
There have been several noteworthy studies on social protection which have come out from the U.S. and around the world. We featured: the long-term impacts of the landmark Progresa cash transfer program in Mexico twenty years later; the twenty-year outcomes of an unconditional cash transfer in which the opening of a casino created a natural cash transfer experiment that was still benefitting those kids twenty years later in the form of better health and financial well-being; the labor market impacts of the universal and permanent cash transfers of the Alaska Permanent Fund where a basic income actually increased work; and results from graduation programs combining psychosocial and economic approaches to alleviating poverty in Niger, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique.
There has been an explosion of studies covering the relationship between social protection and gender. How have pandemic social protection responses affected women differently? See a review on women-led businesses, a study of family dynamics in Kenyan informal settlements which found women earning less and bearing the brunt of household labor and stress, and a deep dive into gender and social protection policies in South Africa and Kerala, India.

That’s a wrap! Be sure to check out our blog for all of the past Roundups if you missed any. You can always follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For the latest on social protection, we always recommend Ugo Gentilini’s weekly links (you can subscribe by email in the upper right corner). Thanks for sticking with us. We hope you learned something new.