What happens to my social protection benefits when I’m on the move in my own country?

Social protection programs are proven to reduce poverty, inequality, and vulnerability. Although program coverage is increasing globally, including in low-income and fragile and conflict-affected contexts, more can be done to respond to the growing scale of internal movement. Limited knowledge on migration patterns — such as whether individuals or families move for work, family reasons, marriage, or by force — remains a challenge, including in the Sahel. Understanding who is moving and why would enable Sahel social protection programs to be better designed, ensuring a continuum of support, and accommodating the different needs of people on the move in coordination with other services and programs. 

A recent study, commissioned by the World Bank, identifies the challenges faced by internal migrants and internally displaced people in accessing and benefitting from social protection interventions. Drawing from global experiences, it highlights good practices for including internal movement considerations into social protection programs and systems. With a special focus on the Sahel, the study offers important insights distilled from interviews across three adaptive social protection programs — supported by the Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program (SASPP) — for integrating an internal migration lens into SASPP programs. The three scenarios below, informed by this study, illustrate the challenges social protection systems face in meeting the needs of people on the move, and highlight opportunities for adapting social protection to be more responsive to internal migrants and displaced populations.

Imagine you are a farmer, living with your family in a rural area of the Sahel. Although your family have limited resources, you are able to meet your daily needs thanks to your goats and millet fields. However, with droughts becoming more severe, together you make the difficult decision to move to another rural area offering more job opportunities. But when you arrive, you quickly see that your earnings are barely enough to feed your children. You decide to approach the mayor for assistance, who explains that your family must be identified as among the poorest households in the community and registered in the social registry to benefit from income support. Unfortunately, the identification process planned every 3 years was rolled out 18 months prior, leaving you and your family without access to support in the short-term.

Opportunities to improve migrant inclusion:

• Strengthen migrant inclusion through dynamic social registries, enabling registration and updated information at any time — both at origin and destination.
• Adapt to migration patterns, through dynamic programs with on-demand enrolment processes.
• Inform support for internal migrants through social registries, program registration, and monitoring processes, generating granular data on mobility dynamics.
• Promote knowledge and access through national public outreach and communication campaigns using several channels — including for programs localized in a specific area.

In another scenario, what if you are a young woman, living with your parents in the Sahel. You are selected to benefit from a social protection program, through which you receive monthly monetary transfers, participate in business training sessions, and launch a savings and loans association along with other beneficiaries. Your entire family benefits from the program, and you even teach your sister, Rokia, the skills you learn in your trainings. However, last year, you got married and joined your husband’s household in another village. As a result, you had to stop participating in the trainings and leave your savings and loans association. The program staff are able to give Rokia your place in the program, but this means that you also stop receiving your monthly monetary transfers. Is it unfair that your benefits stopped now that you are married? You are proud to have already launched a savings and loans association in your new village — it took long to build the trust of your neighbors without speaking their language very well and not always understanding their social and cultural ways.

Opportunities to increase program relevance for migrants:

• Promote portability and continuity of program services to recipients as needed, even if they migrate, ensuring program relevance. 
• Ensure accountability mechanisms are accessible to all, known, and secure, enabling migrant recipients to report migration related information.

Now you are a social safety net program manager in the Sahel. A few months ago, a mass of households fleeing insecurity in the East arrived in one of your program implementation areas. Some were hosted by families, but most were attended to by humanitarian NGOs, providing them temporary shelters and in-kind support. However, recently humanitarian assistance has decreased, and eventually stops. You are able to secure sufficient funds to provide assistance to the most vulnerable, but this process takes two months, leaving many without humanitarian or social protection support. A new program training cycle is about to start, but some households lost their administration papers when they fled, and your team must adapt the enrolment rules and negotiate with the payment operator to facilitate this process. 

Opportunities to create a more enabling financing and policy environment for social protection actors:

• Leverage global financing to contribute a percentage to national budgets, enabling a timely response to sudden arrivals of new migrants.
• Develop national policy frameworks that recognize internal migration and displacement, informing social protection system design, establishing coordination across sectors, and adapting systems to respond to migrants’ specific needs.
• Define policies that link short-term humanitarian assistance with longer term protection support, protecting beneficiaries’ wellbeing and decreasing the long-term impacts of shocks on poverty. 

These three scenarios exemplify the importance of integrating mobility-related considerations into adaptive social protections programs, to better support migrants in contexts of high levels of internal movement. When adaptive social protection programs are more inclusive of internal migrants, not only do they stay meaningful, but they also harness the immense potential of people on the move in the Sahel. To harmonize adaptive social protection with population mobility, migration patterns must be recognized, and policies, programs, and systems adjusted to maximize their impact.

To learn more, read the associated SASPP Policy Note, "Population Mobility in the Sahel: Implications for Social Protection Programs and Systems", available in here in English and French.

References: Branders, Núria, and Rebecca Holmes. 2024. “Integrating Internal Migrants in Social Protection Systems: Review on Good Practices to Inform Adaptive Social Protection Programs in the Sahel” World Bank Group, Washington, DC.