The General Economic Division (GED) of the Planning Commission is about to finalise the National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS) to turn Bangladesh into a middle income country by 2021. The GED has taken this initiative to identify the critical knowledge gaps that have to be addressed, to meet the fiscal challenge of a sustainable system of social safety nets, and to highlight core operational concerns.
The GED prepared the draft of the NSPS, which will be presented in the inception work on Sunday. According to the draft NSPS, it is a priority increasingly reflected in core policy documents such as the Sixth Five-Year Plan and Perspective Plan (2010-2021) as well as in the Vision 2021 goal of inclusive growth and middle income country status.
“It will be a priority increasingly reflected in core policy documents, such as the sixth Five-Year Plan and Perspective Plan (2010-2021), as well as in the Vision 2021 goal of inclusive growth and middle income country status,” the GED said. The NSPS will address nutritional security, urban poverty, promotional safety nets and graduation process, poverty trends in poverty pockets, and climate change and vulnerability. It will also address some priority operational concerns — the framework should, within a plan of action for priority action on implementation of the NSPS, provide a roadmap for institutionalization of the whole system of social protection service deliveries in a medium-term future.
There is also a growing realisation that risk reduction and social protection are important not only in themselves but also because an unaddressed atmosphere of risk carries negative psychological consequences for the livelihood initiatives of the poor and for community efforts at social cohesion, the GED said.
In this sense, social protection is important not only for addressing vulnerability but also for the problems of entrenched poverty and marginalisation.
“At the same time, effective social protection can also become a key policy plank of a transition to a development strategy that embraces, as Bangladesh is doing, a more forward-looking aspiration of middle income status that will prioritise social protection relevant issues, such as inclusive growth and sustainable urbanisation,” the draft NSPS said.
The GED said the importance of a well-designed system of social safety net programmes within a comprehensive approach to social protection has found increasing acceptance within national and global policy circles.
Three factors were at work behind this process of innovation and experimentation. The first has been the embedded humanitarian ethos that has always been a hallmark of Bangladeshi society and that prioritised relief for temporary food insecurity, whether because of disasters or lack of employment. Two foundational programmes arose out of this ethos — the VGF (Vulnerable Group Feeding) programme in 1974 that involved food transfers to extreme poor households and the scaled-up FFW (food-for-work) programme in 1975, which was a food-based workfare programme. These foundational programmes became the cornerstone of an expanding portfolio of programmes that addressed the core concern of temporary food insecurity.
Bangladesh’s social protection spending as a proportion of GDP is among the highest in the South Asia region, averaging 1.8 per cent between 1996 and 2008. The allocation saw a spike in response to global food and energy price crises to about 2.6 per cent of GDP in the 2011 financial year but subsequently, too, allocation has stood above 2 per cent.
The portfolio of programmes includes allowances for population groups with special needs, food security and disaster assistance programmes, workfare programmes, and programmes focused on human development and empowerment. The highest allocation — 44 per cent — is for food security and disaster assistance programmes.
Overall coverage remains low, at around 25 per cent, though recent years have seen an increase in coverage consistent with increase in expenditures. However, within the limits of a relatively low overall coverage, proportional coverage is higher for the poorest
areas and poorest groups, indicating a progressive incidence of safety net benefits.
Though Bangladesh has laid reasonable foundations for a social protection agenda in terms of financial commitment and a portfolio of social safety nets, the system as a whole remains significantly below potential, in terms of its impact on poverty and vulnerability. Benefit levels are inadequate and are often misappropriated. Many programmes suffer from high levels of mis-targeting. Beneficiary perceptions, though generally positive, indicate moderate rather than strong impact.
The GED said effective targeting is one of the core challenges of delivery success on social protection.
“The issues here pertain to several levels — efficacy of targeting approaches such as proxy means testing, field relevance of specific targeting criteria in use, and implementation arrangements that impinge on targeting success,” the GED added.
Though reasonable when international comparisons are made, Bangladesh’s allocation to the social protection sector can be considerably raised to reach international norms. However, this will depend on the fiscal space available.
-With The Independent input
