Advancing Child-Sensitive Social Protection

In recent years, social protection has emerged as a major new focus in efforts to reduce poverty around the world.

Social protection programmes and policies aim to help poor and vulnerable people to counter deprivation and reduce their vulnerability.

Investing in social protection not only supports progress towards a range of Millennium Development Goals, it has the potential to reduce poor people's vulnerabilities to global challenges such as economic shocks, instability in the price of food or other essential commodities, and climate change.

In the current economic and financial crisis, social protection strategies will be a crucial element in effective policy responses.

Save the Children UK has joined UNICEF and a number of partners to create a joint statement on child-sensitive social protection.

The statement lays out why it's important for social protection to be sensitive to children’s needs, outlines approaches and suggests steps for achieving child-sensitive social protection.

In the future, we hope the statement will support further dialogue among stakeholders on the evolving policy and programming aspects of child-sensitive social protection.