Social protection provisions to refugees during the Covid-19 pandemic: lessons learned from government and humanitarian responses

This paper is part of a series: ‘Social protection response to Covid-19 and beyond: lessons learned for adaptive social protection’.

Refugees have been supported by innumerable cash or voucher interventions implemented by international humanitarian and development actors during the Covid-19 pandemic, but only a few of these have explicitly aligned or integrated with government social protection responses. Refugees residing in low- and middle-income countries have mostly been excluded from government social protection responses, and where they have been included (largely in Latin America and the Caribbean) this typically represents a continuation of pre-pandemic policy.

This paper reviews the evidence on:

  • the inclusion of refugees in government-led social protection responses to Covid-19 in the Republic of Congo and Colombia
  • the alignment or integration of international humanitarian and development actors’ cash assistance to refugees and government social protection responses – focusing on Jordan and Pakistan.

It considers the effectiveness of Covid-19 social protection responses for refugees, emerging lessons and whether the crisis and its response holds potential for a longer-term shift in social protection and humanitarian support to refugees.

 

Read the full paper and listen to the podcast here.

This publication first appeared on the ODI site. 

Authors: Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Nathalie Both.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash.

The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ETTG.

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