Since April 2009 a working group of young interns and collaborators from the ILO Social Security Department has been following the impact of the crisis on social security systems and national responses to the challenges posed.

After initial research on more than 60 countries, the working group focused on detailed reports for 13 countries, namely Brazil, Chine, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, the UK, South Africa and the USA. The focus of the research was on the development of contributors and beneficiaries of social security systems, and measures taken in the field of social security as part of the stimulus packages. This sheds some light on the share of crisis relief efforts that are channelled through social security systems as opposed to other measures, and on the extension of existing schemes to cover more people or increase the benefit levels.

Although the impact on countries varies greatly, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn, e.g. that the extension of existing schemes is far more likely than the establishment of new social security systems in times of crisis.

A publication of the country reports and of the trends observed on these countries is planned to be made available on GESS.

MORE INFORMATION:

• See the thematic page "Response to the crisis" in GESS
• Download the document Pensions & the financial crisis

The GESS thematic pages have been enhanced with two new sections with specific information on legislation and statistical data for the subject in question. For instance, for the subject of health you can find international and national legal texts relating to coverage, as well as statistics on healthcare coverage worldwide or at the national level for some countries. For more information, see this news item about the theme page legislation and statistics sections.

Also, in the latest G-News issue, No. 5, there is a short presentation of the features that GESS currently offers for sharing and managing knowledge. For more information, see the news item "Everything you always wanted to know about GESS but didn't dare to ask" in the E-Events section and download the document.

The Honduran Social Security Institute (IHSS) has approved the regulations for the special scheme and progressive affiliation of independent and self-employed workers. With this landmark law, the IHSS has repaid a 50-year old debt, as this group has been without social protection due to the lack of a law including it in the country’s social security system.

To a great extent, this achievement is the result of the good practices learned through courses held by the ILO in strategies for extending social protection to self-employed workers, persons working at home and migrant workers and in social security policy development and management in Latin America.

The number of independent and self-employed workers is increasing, with figures from the 2008 ILO Labour Overview showing that out of every 10 new jobs, 8 are in the informal sector. Independent and self-employed workers currently constitute 52% of the Honduran workforce, i.e., more than 1,516,290 persons, according to INE data from 2008. This renders it urgent to expand IHSS coverage to historically unprotected groups.

More information

The first interview to be published online is with John Woodall, who is a Senior Social Security Specialist with the Social Security Department (SEC/SOC) at the International Labour Office in Geneva, Switzerland.

John has extensive experience in providing support to pension reform in Africa and Asia. In this interview he explains the advantages of transforming provident funds into defined benefit schemes. He also gives a detailed description of past and ongoing SEC/SOC technical cooperation activities in Sri Lanka in the field of social security.

See the interview with John Woodall

The second interview is with Alejandro Bonilla, who is Manager of the ILO Social Security Department's Education, Training and Capacity Building (ETCB) Group.

Alejandro describes the actuarial evaluation of Panama's pension scheme, from which interesting lessons can still be drawn although it took place several years ago. They includ the experience that any technical project in the field of social security is useless unless there is a national consensus on implementing it. A participative process that includes all policy makers, technical stakeholders and employers' and workers' representatives is therefore a key factor for success, as is communication about the project towards a general public.

See the interview with Alejandro Bonilla

This resolution calls for the implementation of the Declaration and requests the UN System organizations, including the international financial institutions, to mainstream the goal of decent work in their policies, programmes and activities through promotion of an integrated approach.

• Link to the Resolution
• Link to the ILO declaration of june 2008

Migrant workers are often prevented from obtaining coverage by social security schemes. They risk the loss of entitlement to social security benefits in their country of origin due to their absence, and may at the same time encounter restrictive conditions under the social security system of the host country.

An important means to overcome these disadvantages is the establishment of bilateral or multilateral social security agreements. Their objective is to coordinate two or more national social security schemes in cases where migrant workers have worked in at least two countries.

The promotion of such bilateral or multilateral social security agreements is the main objective of the MIGSEC project being implemented from 2008 to 2010. The project is financially supported by the German government and is implemented by the ILO Regional Office in Africa in close cooperation with the ILO Migration Programme and the Social Security Department in Geneva.

More information

Providing for Health (P4H) is an extended cooperation of the GTZ-ILO-WHO Consortium on social health protection and involves the ILO, WHO, WB, GTZ and AFD as key actors. P4H is an initiative that supports countries to strengthen their health systems through social health protection with a particular focus on the poor. A P4H business meeting took place in Geneva 22/23 of January to discuss the operational plan for 2009. For more information on P4H, see the flyer.

Social security plays a key role in development in Africa, the Rwandan Prime Minister, B. Makuza, declared at the opening of the first regional forum for social security in Africa, organized by ISSA (18 – 20 November 2008 in Kigali, Rwanda). The purpose of this African forum was to prepare the global forum on social security in South Africa in 2010.

An ILO team of social security experts led by the Director of the subregional office in Yaoundé took part in the work.
The ILO experts reiterated the Office’s vision for social security based on its New Consensus as well as the support that the Office can provide in this respect.
For some years the Social Security Department has been developing the necessary tools for providing social security, especially the SPER (Social Protection Expenditure and Performance Reviews). Studies carried out by the Social Security Department have shown that it is possible to extend social security to the entire population and ensure a basic service package in most developing countries, including several African countries. In Africa, the ILO has implemented strategies and methods for extending social security through several technical cooperation projects (particularly STEP). According to ILO, the factor that determines whether a national social protection policy will be successful is the will to give social security priority as a tool for fighting poverty, as the example of Rwanda shows (read the article here).

The African constituents have reaffirmed the essential role of social security in ensuring “a more socially integrated and economically productive development”, and have called for stronger political commitment in order to guarantee social protection for a larger part of the population.

Sana'a, Yemen - Started in 2005, ILOs work on social health protection in Yemen focused on exploring ways to extend social health protection. To this extent, after a mission to Yemen in 2005 the project was kick-started with a pre-feasibility study to examine how social health protection and access to health services can be improved for the poor. The aim, in particular, was to examine whether community-financing mechanisms might help to improve access to health care. Lack of access to health care exists in Yemen for the following main reasons:

• high cost of health care (especially high direct costs);
• lack of availability of medicines;
• maternal and child health care especially require attention (due to issues of gendered access to health care, where women choose to forsake health care in order not to inconvenience anyone);
• low quality of health services.

In addition to this, like many low- and middle-income countries, the majority of the population in Yemen faces the problem of an access deficit. While 85% of its population resides in the rural area, the majority of the available health care is situated in the urban areas. Significantly, while the ratio of qualified health personnel to the population has been rising in recent years, inadequate staffing of health facilities is also an important concern.

ILOs activities in Yemen have looked at extending social health protection in the face of these challenges, with the idea of addressing the financial barriers in particular through implementing community based financing initially. ILOs above activities regarding extending social health protection in Yemen suggest that conditions are in place for effective community financing. Community financing is a building block towards enhanced social protection in health. Alongside the strengthening of the current tax-financed public health service, commercial health insurance, Social health insurance and Community financing provide opportunities to increase access to care and financial protection. Community financing is especially useful to target population groups active in the informal economy. These groups are typically amongst the poorer segments of the population.

The core conditions for community financing are in place in Yemen, at least when the analysis is applied at the national level. However, there is wide variance in local-level factors such as the quality of available care, the degree to which local communities are closely-knit and households' financial resources for health. This indicates that the feasibility of community financing schemes can only be locally confirmed. Undoubtedly there will be some localities where community financing is not an element of a solution towards greater access to health care and financial protection.There's but one way to know if community financing in Yemen has a great potential in financing health care and providing social protection: that is to implement the approach in a pilot and then on a wider scale through a nation-wide programme. Pilots in different areas should be documented and learning organised so that practitioners as well as policy makers can draw lessons to increase the effectiveness of extending social health protection in the future.

On 7 November, 2008, the West African economic and monetary union (UEMOA) member states’ Ministers in charge of social insurance met in the UEMOA Council of Ministers room.

At the end of the meeting, the Ministers recommended to the UEMOA Statutory Council of Ministers that they adopt the regulation project concerning regulation of social insurance within the UEMOA.

In addition, they advised the member states to:

• put in place an administrative body for social insurance and a National Guarantee Fund and mobilize material, human and financial resources necessary for them to function;
• put in place programmes to reinforce social insurance capacity;
• develop a extension policy document as well as an action plan.

The ILO/DfID project in Tanzania has received documents describing a Community-Based Conditional Cash Transfer Pilot being implemented through Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF). The project, as described in these documents - aims to reach the most vulnerable elderly and children, such as those living in child-headed households, orphans and chronically ill children, the very poor or the very sick elderly without a caregiver. In 80 villages, households meeting these eligibility criteria are now being identified, registered and their data input into a database. 40 villages will be randomly selected from the 80 villages, as what is called "treatment" villages and then eligible households will start to be paid benefits early 2009. The payments will continue only if the beneficiaries meet additional behavioural conditions which are linked to school attendance for school-age children and to visits to health facilities for small children and elderly in order to get vaccination or medical examination and advice. Those who are eligible will however receive these benefits for maximum 20 months as the project foresees neither rolling out the scheme nationally nor continuation at least for those who will have acquired benefit entitlements during the pilot.

The eligible poorest households in the other 40 villages will not be given any benefits as they are unlucky to live in a "control" group of villages. How they manage to survive in comparison to those getting benefits will be closely monitored for the purposes of a scientifically designed project's evaluation exercise.

This raises serious ethical concerns. We know from other African pilot cash transfer schemes targeted at the most vulnerable that the majority of beneficiaries identified by communities as the most vulnerable have been surviving before the start of the pilot by begging for food in the neighbourhood. Experimenting on such extremely poor and vulnerable individuals in order just to prove scientifically what is intuitively obvious for everybody - that even small amounts of cash dramatically changes lives of these people - is not acceptable.

I hope, however, that the actual implementation of the project will follow a different path. The benefits should be paid to everybody meeting eligibility criteria in all covered villages. Effectiveness of conditionality can be tested in the following way: households in "treatment" villages receive a supplement to their benefits if they meet the conditionality and only basic benefit if they don't, while to those eligible living in "control villages", no conditionality is applied and they all receive the basic benefit. Basic benefit should be at least at the level foreseen now, that is 100% of the food poverty line for eligible elderly and 50% for eligible children. At the same time, the national debate and supporting analytical work should start to aim at designing, legislating and implementing a national social cash transfer's programme or a set of programmes aimed at various groups. Also, the organizers of the pilot commit themselves to continuing financing and delivering the benefits beyond the planned project's duration to all beneficiaries who became entitled during the duration of the project as long as they are meeting the eligibility conditions.

Any social protection scheme creates an obligation towards the beneficiaries. Even under pilot schemes this obligation should be honoured and interests of the beneficiaries have to be protected. Conditions stated above have thus to be met in case of any pilot, also the one implemented in Tanzania.

Krzystzof Hagemejer

See Tanzania page in GESS