Child-sensitive Social Protection

Poverty is a fundamental barrier to realizing the rights of all children, including targets of the Sustainable Development Goals to end preventable child deaths, ensure quality basic education for all children and protect children from all forms of violence. Currently, an estimated 385 million children live in extreme poverty, at rates much higher than those among adults.1 The harm poverty inflicts on children is often irreversible and is transmitted from generation to generation. It is further exacerbated during humanitarian crises as households are pressured to adopt coping strategies that can negatively impact on girls and boys.

Social protection is a basic human right for children, enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC Articles 26-27). Based on the Convention, children have the right to social security and an adequate standard of living, both of which can be guaranteed for children and families who live in poverty through publicly-funded social protection. At the same time, social protection is a key investment in building human capabilities, reducing financial barriers that families face in using basic services, and in breaking inter-generational poverty traps.

Social protection, overall, is now widely recognised as one of the foremost interventions as part of the policy package for fighting child poverty. Child-sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) is a well-proven approach within social protection to help realize the rights of children. CSSP helps families to cope with chronic poverty, stresses and shocks and enables them to invest on an adequate and continuing basis in their children’s well-being. CSSP encompasses programmes that aim to maximise positive impacts on children and to minimise potential unintended side effects. This includes both direct interventions (i.e. child-focused or targeted) and indirect interventions.

CSSP can be implemented in both humanitarian and development contexts, and across sectoral areas, to advance the rights and wellbeing of children, including – particularly - those who are poorest and most deprived. In that regard, it is important that CSSP does not only focus on children living with their families, but also recognises and addresses the needs of children living outside of households, such as children without parental care.6