The Government of Madagascar, with support from the World Bank, provides more than 80,000 extreme poor households with access to safety nets through regular cash transfers while promoting nutrition, early childhood development, school attendance of children and productive activities of families. Pictured here is a cash transfer in the town of Betafo.
Photo: Mohammad Al-Arief/The World Bank.
Designing social protection programs in a progressively digital world calls for a big-picture, systems-thinking approach to building shared infrastructure that functions in a whole-of-government way. Harnessing technology, data, and governance tools offers a unique opportunity to rapidly scale-up the delivery of social protection in times of need and over the lifecycle of people in need.
The Playbook on Digital Social Protection Delivery Systems: Towards Dynamic Inclusion and Interoperability, launched in May 2024, is an experience- and practice-rich knowledge resource for developing a Digital Social Protection Delivery Systems (DSPDS) framework to scale-up social protection delivery in a time of expanding crises. Developed jointly by 23 leading inter-governmental and development agencies, including the World Bank, ILO, GIZ, and WFP, among others, as an inter-agency social protection assessments (ISPA) tool under the Digital Social Protection working group of the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B)—an initiative launched at the request of the 2022 meeting of the G20 Development Working Group—it applies a digital public infrastructure (DPI) approach and draws from operations and initiatives undertaken in countries the world over.
The Playbook is specifically designed for social protection policymakers and practitioners working in low- and middle-income countries. Intended to be accessible, ease-of-use was kept firmly in mind. Comprised of a Guidance Note and an Assessment Tool, the Playbook is meant to be instructive and easily applicable. Taking a modular and referential approach, it is not meant to be read in a linear, cover-to-cover fashion. The Guidance Note sets up a forward-looking framework to address the core characteristics of DSPDS that cascade down to data, process, technology, legal, institutional, and performance criteria involved in designing, implementing, and governing such systems. The accompanying Assessment Tool is meant to be used to take stock of existing systems, as laid out in the Guidance Note. The result of the two pieces is an overall framework for enhanced, human-centered delivery of social services and benefits—one that ensures dignity for those in need, grows trust between people and the state, heightens capacity, and improves overall ecosystem security and individual protection and privacy.
In line with the SPIAC-B, social protection is defined as “the set of policies and programs aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their life cycles, placing a particular emphasis on vulnerable groups.” Although the Playbook mostly focuses on non-contributory social protection programs, its core tenets can be relevant to contributory schemes as well. As countries transition toward universal social protection, it is crucial to prioritize support to the poorest and most vulnerable, with social assistance playing a central role.
As an ISPA tool, the Playbook was thoroughly peer-reviewed—including by leading intergovernmental and development agencies—and builds upon existing ISPA tools, such as those on systems for unique identification (2016) and payments (2020), as well as World Bank outputs, including the Sourcebook on the Foundations of Social Protection Delivery Systems (2020), the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives (2021), and the Combatting Cybercrime: Tools and Capacity Building for Emerging Economies (2024).
The Playbook seeks to lay out a holistic approach to data governance, analytics, and decision-making. Through in-depth analyses and real-life case studies, it highlights how creating robust digital delivery systems strengthen social protection service delivery, while also improving transparency, increasing accountability, and encouraging participation. The Playbook incorporates country examples throughout—for instance:
- Argentina’s creation of a foundational unique identification system which interoperates with provincial civil registries but is managed by a central authority (Registro Nacional de las Personas, or “Renaper”);
- Chile’s transition from a static, census-based, household social registry to a dynamic social registry (or “dSR”) with on-demand registration and updates via municipal offices and an online citizen platform for applications (Registro Social de Hogares, or RSH);
- Togo’s cash assistance program (“Novissi”)—an emergency COVID-19 initiative that is now being consolidated—which limits person-to-person interactions through the use of novel data sources (e.g., satellite imagery, call detail records) and which leveraged artificial intelligence to prioritize the rural poor, with an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) application for on-demand registration and notification to those without internet, and with payments made directly to mobile money accounts;
- Türkiye’s consolidation of its various digital social protection delivery systems and more to create a single dynamic and interoperable system, called the Integrated Social Assistance System (Bütünleşik Sosyal Yardım Bilgi Sistemi, or ISAS), which relies upon data from 28 administrative data sources and decentralized offices, and enables applications to 50 programs simply by providing a unique identity number through a single online portal.
Today’s global challenges have far-reaching consequences that jeopardize human capital gains and reverse poverty declines, with implications for productivity and economic growth. Anchored in recent work on delivery systems, the targeting of social assistance, adaptive social protection, data governance, and existing ISPA tools, the Playbook aims to help social protection policymakers and practitioners apply a big picture, systems-thinking approach. Taking such an approach is urgently needed for the 4 billion people who lack any form of social protection, of whom some 670 million (around 8.4 percent of the world’s population) live in extreme poverty.
Download and review the Playbook here.
Join the Conversation