World Bank urges govt to focus on social protection

The global director for social and jobs, World Bank Group, Mr Michal Rutkowski

What you need to know:

  • The World Bank said social registries need to be more dynamic and integrated with other delivery system components.

The World Bank has advised the government to make spending in social protection a priority while executing the fiscal policy because expanding the coverage of social registries is important for improving delivery systems which directly benefit the vulnerable people.
The World Bank said social registries need to be more dynamic and integrated with other delivery system components.

In his presentation during a dialogue on social protection as investment on Wednesday, the global director for social and jobs, World Bank Group, Mr Michal Rutkowski, said Uganda, like other countries facing the challenges of social protection, should address the coverage gap, move from exclusion to inclusion by having a well-documented national registry on social protection in place.
“Prioritise the poorest and most vulnerable with adequate support for the different risks that households face across the lifecycle. Develop new instruments to support the ‘missing middle’.  Continue to expand coverage in Food Consumption Score . Account for specific needs of women and girls, and other excluded groups such as people with disabilities, indigenous populations, migrants,” Mr  Rutkowski said.

He said others are addressing the flexibility gap by moving from inflexibility to responsiveness to increase capacity of the Social Protection Justice system to help households adapt to shocks.  
“Particularly ensure that programmes are designed to maximise contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation,” Mr Rutkowski said.
The World Bank official also said other priorities should be on addressing the opportunity gap, productive programmes, increasing the level of ambition in terms of scale and quality of labour market and productive inclusion programmes to recover from  Covid-19.

The Minister of State for Northern Uganda Rehabilitation, Ms Grace Fredom Kwiyucwiny,  said social protection is an investment in human development and should not be seen as a consumption.
Ms Kwiyucwiny said the theme of the conference; “Investing in Human Capital to Build Resilience and Productivity for Inclusive Growth” is relevant to the current concern about increasing population and unemployment with 54 percent of the Uganda population being youth below 18 years of age.

“Social protection should be looked at as an investment in people not as a consumption means, over the past years, the government focused so much on infrastructure development, not on household development,” she said.
Ms Kwiyuwiny added: “I am happy that we are having this stakeholder dialogue to help us explore what can be done to deepen social protection and build resilience, invest in human capital development, and promote inclusive growth.”