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Leaving No-One Behind: Targeted Social Assistance Programmes and Management Information Systems in Arab Countries

20
-
21
November
2019
Location: 
Amman, Jordan
Event Type: 

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes “that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development”. To do so governments of the UN Member States are called to “implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable” (SDG1, target 1.3). In addition, Goal 10 aims at reducing inequality with special attention to the bottom 40 per cent of the population.

In recent decades, due to a variety of social, economic and political pressures, Arab countries are undertaking substantive social protection reforms. In the domain of social assistance, countries are seeking to replace universal subsidies with more targeted measures, typically cash-transfers, which raises a number of questions of how to define poverty and set poverty line, how to identify the poor, etc. Furthermore, these reforms require a lot in terms of management information systems that are necessary to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of individual programmes and achieve coordination between programmes across the complex social protection landscape.

This workshop will be implemented under the Development Account project “Implementation and follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Enhancing the Capacities of Arab countries”. The workshop aims to facilitate the regional exchange of knowledge and skills of ESCWA member countries to efficiently design, implement and monitor social assistance programmes and establish management information systems leaving no one behind. As a result, the workshop will strengthen the capacity of Arab countries to operationalize the 2030 Agenda (with specific focus on goals 1, 10 and 17).