Training on Renewable Energy

Energy for Social Protection

Energy for Social Protection is an integrated framework to address the complex social impact of the energy transition by supporting individuals and families in dealing with vulnerabilities along their lifecycle.

This includes reduced energy poverty and social exclusion, stimulating job creation including by providing up/re-skilling programs, co-creating gender sensitive micro and area-based schemes to address vulnerability and support inclusive growth at the community level, strengthen youth economic inclusion, improve health access through energy incentives.  

Ensuring strong social protection systems for energy transition is critical for delivering on UNDP’s energy ambition. UNDP brings several decades of social protection experience on promoting universal social protection, female empowerment, informal workers protection, migrants and youth empowerment, adaptive social protection systems, supporting households affected by environmental degradation and climate shocks, linking emergency social assistance to longer term recovery. This significant intersectional and interdisciplinary expertise will be critical to bridge the silos by finding non-traditional pathways to tackle the complex energy challenges of our member countries.

The five main social protection interventions to be taken into consideration when working on smoothing the impact of the energy transition are:  

  1. Supporting workers who lost their job with individualized plan including up/re-skilling, early retirement, or internal mobility 

  1. Setting up a social investment programme with social assistance programmes such as directed cash transfers as well as dedicated entrepreneurship program to incubate new projects with capacity building and 2-year follow-up. 

  1. Conducting a study to identify the main dynamics of future development in the region as well as highest opportunity employment segments. 

  1. Creating local offices for social action in partnership with the municipality and state employment and training services, providing psychological, employment, training and social support for workers, their families and the local community. 

  1. Supporting a dedicated programme to strengthen local NGOs social actions and foster a more robust local community. 

 

Our focus

Our priority is to ensure that negative social outcomes from the energy transition are avoided or offset by designing policies to take this into account and pairing them with measures that counteract any risks. We do this by:  

  • Supporting our member countries to develop social protection mechanism for the energy transition – from building institutional capabilities to developing innovative policies; to creating effective partnerships to promote social investment; to monitoring, evaluate and scale-up successful social outcomes.  

  • Aiming to prepare, respond, recover the social and economic wellbeing of communities affected by the consequences of the energy transition. As we operationalize this adaptive workstream, these three pillars will help us think from a systemic approach while embracing our ethics and core values and generating deep insights, making informed choices, and delivering more effectively.    

  • Integrating social protection into energy policy design. This is a key step to ensure that the transition leaves no-one-behind.