Social protection
UNICEF works with the government of The Gambia to ensure that every child has a fair chance in life.
The challenge
The Gambia is ranked 174th out of 193 countries in the 2024 UNDP Human Development Index. A recent multidimensional analysis of child poverty estimated that 9 out of 10 children in the country are poor and deprived of at least one dimension: sanitation (80 per cent), nutrition (47 per cent) and education (31 per cent).
The primary cause of this reality is attributed to poverty, inequality, and vulnerability leasing to inadequate access to basic social services (health, educational services, and standard of living) particularly in the very early years of life. The Gambia’s economic outlook is slowly recovering from the aftermath of COVID-19, the global food, food price inflation, fuel, supply chain and insecurity crises, severe flooding and less remittances resulting in a slower growth in recent years Coupled with Limited fiscal and space impacting financing social protection for the most vulnerable children. These above-mentioned crises may decelerate continued poverty reduction.
To address the existing challenges and alleviate the social and economic impact of poverty on children and adolescent, adequate human capital investment is needed to tackle the root causes of poverty.
The solution
Our support to the Government of The Gambia, especially to the Office of the Vice President - National Social Protection Secretariat, Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, The National Assembly, and Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Welfare focuses on building the National Social Protection System including creating an enabling policy and legislative environment, increase service deliver for coverage and reach including humanitarian settings and demand creation through the participation of children and adolescent to amplify their voices. strengthening the institutional and operational framework of social protection coordination and service delivery for the most vulnerable in society with a keen eye on children.
Our programme focuses on three main areas of action:
- Strengthening social protection systems: We support the strengthening of social protection leadership and governance to design and deliver effective and efficient child responsive and shock responsive social protection programmes. This includes the support to the government to strengthen the capacity of the National Social Protection Secretariat for coordination and monitoring, set up a unified Grievance Redress Mechanism, and establish a National Social Protection Single Registry that is fully functional with the possibility of integration with the Civil Registry and Vital Statistics system.
- Social protection programming: We work with the Government and development partners to advocate for and mobilize resources to implement child responsive, and shock responsive social protection programmes. The goal is to support the introduction of new social protection programmes and promote the expansion of existing initiatives to address the key priority areas such as nutrition and health. This will help raise the profile of social protection and human capital development for increased government investment and ownership.
- Public finance for children: We work strategically with the government particularly National Assembly to help in enhancing their capacity and providing them with technical assistance to learn best practices and use evidence to advocate for increased government investment and efficiency in the social sectors. In addition, we also support the respective committee of the National Assembly to routinely conduct monitoring mission to engage with service providers and communities to promote accountability and transparency in the social sectors. Support is also provided to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs to increase budget creditability, transparency, accountability and citizen participation. We also support the Gambia Bureau of Statistics to conduct monetary and multidimensional evidence generation to measure poverty. Children and adolescent participation is integrated across all three areas of action. This is to fulfill their right to participation, increase their self-esteem and self believe, crease safe space for community engagement and co-decide on matters that affect them at all levels.