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Background
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Poverty affects people
of all ages, but children are the single most affected group. Children
living in poverty experience deprivation, exclusion, and vulnerability.
They face multidimensional circumstances that create life-long difficulties
for gaining access to their basic rights. Poverty also denies children their
rights and deprives them of their physical, psychological, and intellectual
development. Effects of deprivation in childhood are irreversible and child
poverty can lead to poverty in adulthood, i.e.,
intergenerational-transmission. In addition, poverty is one of the root
causes of violent cases, exploitation, abuse, and neglect of children—i.e.,
child labour, trafficking, sexual exploitation, child marriage. Children
experience poverty both in individual and household aspects. At the
individual level, children are deprived of access to primary health,
nutrition, and education while at the household level they share poverty
experience with other members of family in terms of poor sanitation, family
shelter, income, safe drinking water, etc. The multiple poverty experienced
by children obviously calls for special care and protection for them in
order to ensure they get the rights they are capable to have. Since
children comprise a significant proportion of the world’s population, the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has specifically acknowledged
many states’ commitment to fulfil children’s rights. The Convention is the
first legally binding international convention to promote and protect
children’s rights by involving parents, family, institutions, international
communities, and the state.
Although
the discussion on poverty has been revealed in various research, actions
and policies, major discussion on poverty reduction heavily lies on income
and consumption approaches, yielding policy framework that is predominantly
adult centric. In 2000 UNICEF published “Poverty Reduction Begins with
Children” and argued that poverty reduction must begin with protection and
realization of children’s rights since children are a form of investment
for achieving equitable and sustainable human rights development (Vandermoortele,
2000). Childhood is a rapid physical, emotional, and intellectual
development. Childhood, however, is also one of the most vulnerable times
in the life cycle. Children as individuals, members of household, as well
as citizens are inextricably linked to the well-being of a society. In
order to break the inter-generational transmission of poverty, a country or
even a region needs to invest in children.
Social
protection is one way to reduce poverty and protect the people, including
children, from falling into worse deprivation. It has gained substantial
attention during the last decade as part of actions to reduce poverty and
the vulnerability of the poorest and most marginalized people in the world.
Social protection is defined as a set of public and private policies and
programs aimed at preventing, reducing, and eliminating economic and social
vulnerabilities to poverty and deprivation (UNICEF, 2012). Globally, social protection has become
central in the endeavour to reduce poverty worldwide and is one of the
focuses of UN interventions. In 2009, the United Nations System Chief
Executives Board, in response to the global economic crisis, launched the
Social Protection Floor Initiative which is co-led by the ILO and WHO. The
report titled “Social Protection Floor for Fair and Inclusive
Globalization”, was used as an advocacy document for the G20 discussions on
social protection. The document aims to ensure that the progress for
children is achieved in an equitable manner by helping the most vulnerable
children to have their rights fulfilled. The framework makes the case for investing in social
protection for children, and demonstrates how social protection is a
cross-cutting tool with the potential to complement investments across
sectors, resulting in more equitable outcomes.
The
1997/1998 crisis was the main impetus for many countries in the world to
develop various social protection schemes as models of market-led
development. Some of the social protection schemes directly or indirectly
target children both in rural and urban areas. They can have several components which include social transfers,
program to access services, support and care, as well as formulation of
certain regulation. In countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Philippines, and Vietnam have provided health insurance and education
stipend for poor families. Cash transfer programs, either conditional or
unconditional, have been implemented in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines
and Vietnam. In Thailand, children get benefits through
income security; while in India, some of the social protection programs
provide scholarships for children in rural areas.
UNICEF
(2012) argues that a child-sensitive social protection can help address the
age-sensitive and multidimensional vulnerabilities of children while also
strengthening capabilities of families and households to care for their
children. In Vietnam,
among others, social protection is supported through professionalization of
social work. The government noticed the potential role of social workers
during delivery of social assistance, thus since 2012 a program on National
Programme on Development of Social Work as Profession was established. This
program provides training for social workers on various functions such as
raising the awareness of community, assisting families to receive benefits,
and filing complaints from the field.
In Indonesia, concerns on social
protection as a poverty reduction strategy have been growing since the
1997/1998 Asian financial crisis. The Government of Indonesia (GoI) has
shown its commitment by passing some social protection laws, including Law
No. 23/2002 on Child Protection, Law No. 40/2004 on National Social
Security System, Law No. 11/2009 on Social Welfare, and Law No. 13/2011 on
Services for the Poor. At the time of crisis, GoI with support from several
international agencies initiated social safety net programs covering food
security, health, education, and employment creation. The first three
programs involved children nutritional status and children’s health as well
as prevent children from dropping out of school and keep them off street.
These programs are continued and modified into three clusters of
anti-poverty programs, i.e., social assistance, community empowerment, and
microenterprises empowerment. The social assistance cluster aims at
reducing the economic burden of the poor by providing social assistance
schemes on food security, healthcare, unconditional cash transfer,
conditional cash transfer, and scholarship. Most programs in this cluster
target children as their beneficiaries, although they are also indirectly
targeted in other clusters. Indonesia’s PKH, for example, is an alternative
poverty reduction strategy focusing on improving the education and health
of poor families, especially women and children. Other programs related to
children welfare, such as those for neglected children and children shelter
supervision, have also been implemented. However, challenges to the successful
implementation of these schemes have yet to be dealt with, including
program designs, targeting, data updating, coordination among implementing
institutions, and distribution.
Although
it is argued that social protection helps increase households’ capacity to
take care of their family members and overcome barriers to accessing
services, many questions remain whether social protection reaches the
poorest of the poor or the most vulnerable element in the society. Barriers
still tend to remain, even when services and national human development
averages improve. Many
questions remain in efforts to strengthen and expand integrated social
protection system. In global context there are still debates whether
coverage of social protection should be universal or targeted, or whether
cash transfers should be conditional or unconditional.
This
conference, jointly organized by Bappenas, UNICEF Indonesia, and The SMERU
Research Institute, is a venue to discuss and exchange experiences of
social protection program implementation and researches among policymakers,
researchers, and other agencies (international organizations and NGOs) in
regard to improving policies and their delivery. Through presentations and
publication of selected policy papers and posters, the conference will
produce numerous policy recommendations to be used in support of
evidence-based policy.
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Topics of
policy papers
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The papers will be
selected from, but not limited to, the following issues:
o Dimension of poverty faced by children
(individual or household dimension of poverty, deprivation and disparity, and
general well-being of children) and ways to protect them.
o How to incorporate children’s needs in
social protection scheme (health, nutrition, education, quality of care,
child protection).
o Towards inclusive social
protection (what the most appropriate
and effective social protection scheme or program to address specific
groups of children under specific circumstances, e.g., gender, children,
disability and ethnicity, universal vs
targeted social protection scheme.
o Social protection for children
vs poverty reduction strategy
(what works best for children, who does what: national/local government,
family/community based program, etc)
o Strengthening and
expanding integrated social protection system: how to ensure age-specific
vulnerabilities over the life cycle are addressed, particularly the various
stages from birth up to adolescence?
o Strengthening and
expanding integrated social protection system: what complementary
measures/policies need to be in place to achieve social protection for
children?
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Who are (still) left behind from social protection (looking at
migrants and refugees, children out of school)?
o Enabling environment for
social protection for children (supply-side complementary measures, role of
family, schools, posyandu/health
centers, government, social workers, community)
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Social
protection, poverty reduction, and demographic bonus
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Social
protection impacts (for children in particular) and governance
(financial-fiscal implications, delivery mechanisms, grievance and redress,
etc.).
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