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Our work on social protection
UNDP offers strategic support to strengthen inclusive, resilient, and sustainable social protection systems that leave no one behind. Our approach prioritizes vulnerable populations and enhances national capacities to respond and adapt to economic, environmental, and social shocks. Through technical expertise, policy guidance, and collaborative partnerships, we help build systems that promote equity, safeguard livelihoods, and foster long-term resilience.
UNDP's offer on social protection in LAC
Measuring poverty and vulnerability is essential to evaluating the effectiveness of social protection systems and policies, and to driving services and benefits to beneficiaries. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) captures poverty in various dimensions, beyond income. The LAC region is a pioneer in developing national measures of multidimensional poverty, with Mexico and Colombia as forerunners. Countries with a national MPI use it for purposes such as monitoring poverty trends, evaluating reduction policies, national planning, coordination across ministries, budget allocation, and policy formulation.
In social protection, beyond being a targeting tool, the MPI helps set baselines for monitoring and evaluating intervention impacts. The MPI can adapt with high granularity to specific population needs. MPIs can also be combined with other data sources to tailor policy responses to diverse situations.
Our evaluation of social protection systems analyzes labor market inequalities and gender biases, along with other demographic variables such as ethnicity, age, and location. Some populations groups typically enjoy preferential access to comprehensive social protection, while women, Afro-descendants, Indigenous people, rural workers, children, and the youth often receive only limited social assistance benefits and services.
Protection systems must be effective: They must protect individuals and households from the effects of social risks and against poverty and vulnerability and contribute to human development and inclusive growth. Social protection systems costs should not compromise other relevant social imperatives, and they should avoid creating perverse incentives for individuals and households. UNDP offers governments in the region evaluations at both macro and micro levels.
UNDP supports governments and organizations design and implement effective strategies to promote inclusive labor markets and reduce poverty through enhanced access to employment, improved livelihoods, and strengthened institutional capacity.
This support includes the design of job creation programs, youth employment strategies, unemployment insurance schemes, and income support mechanisms. The main goal is to help deliver efficient and adaptive programs that respond to labor market challenges and protect vulnerable populations.
UNDP helps countries in develop their social infrastructure, including social registries and identification and payment systems. This involves advocating for the adoption or improvement of social registries, developing comparative studies, analyzing questionnaires, and designing digital solutions. UNDP's support also includes the development, implementation, or expansion of these systems, and the enhancement of interoperability between social registries and other administrative databases.
While UNDP promotes the use of digital solutions, in LAC the focus is on improving public infrastructure. This means prioritizing the use of technology to enhance data quality and reduce unnecessary burdens on potential beneficiaries. Rather than deploying solutions that require advanced digital skills from users, efforts prioritize inclusive approaches that increase accessibility and strengthen the efficiency of social protection systems.
The provision of care services is crucial from both social protection and gender perspectives, extending the discussion beyond formal and informal employment to include labor market participation. Publicly-funded care services are vital for increasing women’s participation in the labor market and reducing their disproportionate burden of unpaid caregiving. As many countries in the region face rapid demographic changes, the demand for public care services for older people is expected to grow.
Parental leave and care services influence the distribution of caregiving within households and women's labor participation and also affects gender wage gaps. Well-designed, high-quality care services are key to promoting gender equality and provide sustainable, long-term solutions.
Adaptive social protection integrates social protection policies with two other key policy areas closely linked to climate change: climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. In this context, social protection must align its tools and policies to strengthen preparedness for and response to climate-related disasters, helping to reduce climate vulnerabilities, absorb shocks, and improve resilience and recovery. A growing number of international frameworks advocate for the role of social protection in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
Strengthened social protection systems help prevent poverty from increasing aftershocks and, when coordinated with agencies responsible for disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation, support national efforts to prepare for and respond to climate-related events. Such coordination enhances the effectiveness of early warning systems, enables faster responses, and ensures that vulnerable populations receive timely assistance. UNDP works on social protection not only related to recovery but also for building long-term resilience in the face of increasing climate hazards.
Increasing coverage, adequacy, and responsiveness of social protection leads to higher public expenditure on these policies. However, this does not necessarily mean an increase in overall public spending or fiscal deficits. Financing for social protection expansion can come from various sources, including pension reforms, such as adjusting overly generous and regressive schemes, and revising generalized subsidies, which often exceed the cost of social assistance and tend to be regressive. Administrative actions to close revenue loopholes can also support the improvement of social protection systems.
UNDP’s Regional Hub offers governments advocacy, policy design proposals, and ex-ante impact assessments of pension and subsidy reforms using fiscal microsimulations. UNDP also provides financial support services through the Sustainable Finance Hub, including support for Integrated National Financing Frameworks, Tax Inspectors Without Borders, and SDG bond issuance schemes.
