at risk mitigation and adaptation, promoting environmentally friendly livelihoods, and providing drinking water and sanitation facilities to urban slums.
while subsidies for health, education and social services in general find a major place in the stimulus packages of China, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong, China. Easing the availability of finance for affected groups – women and small firms – has also been stressed in the stimulus packages of India and Thailand.
MDG-8 – Develop a global partnership for development Under MDG 8, social protection which serves as a lynchpin for inclusive economic development can benefit from increased donor support – in terms of capacity building, knowledge sharing and financial support. Social funds and communitybased efforts can also be used directly to promote youth welfare.
To be effective as a crisis relief measure these social protection measures should be able to target the affected people and provide adequate benefits that meet the requirements during the crisis period, and to overcome the crisis impacts. The experience during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 brought out some of the major deficiencies of the social protection programmes on these two counts. An ESCAP study, based on surveys conducted in Indonesia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand, showed that the public works programmes, for example, failed to target women who lost jobs in formal sectors, while the unemployment insurance schemes did not benefit workers in the informal sector in any significant manner (ESCAP, 2002). Moreover, the additional income provided by these programmes was inadequate to cover the basic needs of the beneficiaries, and the benefits were not sustained sufficiently long for the affected people to overcome the impacts of that crisis. The micro-credit programmes, while successful in targeting women with low education, failed to reach those who had lost jobs in the formal sector. Similarly, the credit programmes for small and medium enterprises failed to reach those firms that suffered the most during the crisis and had to resort to job cuts. Further, the size of the credit provided under these programmes was insufficient to give a significant boost to the employment and incomes of the beneficiaries. The common bottlenecks in these programmes relate to deficiencies in design, administration and implementation, along with the appropriate monitoring and evaluation, in addition to sustainable financing.
Social protection to reduce the impact of crisis and support MDG achievement The current economic crisis is expected to result in higher unemployment and poverty in the region, thus retarding the progress in MDG-1, and in turn affect other MDGs such as nutrition, health and education outcomes. Social protection measures, by providing additional income to the poor, and maintaining their food intake and access to education and health services, can support the MDG achievements during such crises. While several types of social protection measures exist, some are particularly relevant for tackling crisis situations as they can provide quick relief in the short-term to the poor. Important amongst these are (i) employment generation measures, (ii) cash transfers programmes - conditional or unconditional, (iii) targeted expansion of coverage of social services, such as feeding programmes, and health and education programmes, with particular focus on providing benefits to women and girls, and (iv) expansion of micro-credit schemes to affected groups and localities. Many of these programmes are in the nature of social assistance programmes and social services. Indeed, as seen in the previous chapter, the stimulus packages announced by some countries do contain many such social protection measures for crisis relief. For example, the stimulus package in India includes an expansion of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, while Indonesia’s stimulus package lays stress on labour- intensive infrastructure projects. The stimulus packages in the Philippines and Thailand include social security benefits and cash transfers to the poor,
All these problems are solvable – as experience across the region has demonstrated – especially if the affected local community plays an important role in their design and operation, including the control of funds. In addition to the well known example of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, other examples of effective social protection programmes include:
60