ESCAP convened a regional meeting “Accelerating Implementation of the Regional Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Cooperation on Social Protection” on 7 October 2024 to bring together partner countries1 involved in national stocktaking exercises on social protection as part of the Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Cooperation on Social Protection in Asia and the Pacific. The meeting was held back-to-back with the eighth session of the Committee on Social Development, 8-10 October 2024, Bangkok.
The stocktaking exercises provide a comparative overview of social protection systems and identify opportunities to strengthen social protection systems, ranging from efforts towards institutional coordination mechanisms to digitalization to universal social protection programmes. They have also served to provide a platform at the national level to discuss ways to promote social protection and have served to identify new and emerging issues that social protection systems need to address.
Despite efforts to enhance the inclusiveness of social protection schemes, gaps remain. A variety of factors contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable groups from social protection schemes, including eligibility criteria, targeting methodologies, administrative and implementation constraints or weak enforcement measures. In addition, social protection systems are confronted by an increasingly volatile riskscape in Asia and the Pacific. With increasing attention towards adaptive and shock-responsive social protection systems, routine social protection systems are under pressure, and it is necessary to rethink how social protection can best support preparedness, early warning systems, post-crises rehabilitation as well as financing mechanisms to respond to climate change-related shocks and build climate resilience.
The meeting aimed to exchange knowledge, discuss entry points and capacity needs to support national policy development on climate resilient social protection, and identify priority pathways and capacity development needs to advance the regional agenda on social protection.