Social protection and inclusion
UNICEF believes that empirical research and data gathering are essential elements to reducing multi-dimensional poverty and building resilience of the most vulnerable boys and girls
Challenges
This programme seeks to strengthen the capacity to monitor children’s rights, reduce multidimensional poverty and provide inclusive and equitable access to social protection services, especially for the most disadvantaged children.
It seeks to ensure that national systems and policies effectively address the multiple deprivations that affect the most vulnerable boys and girls across the lifecycle, building their resilience through social investments and rights-based social policies. The programme will provide technical support to facilitate the decentralization of services, when needed, to better serve and protect children and their families throughout the country. These efforts will build on the existing initiatives of key actors.
The capacity strengthening of national statistics offices and civil registry offices will remain a priority in order to improve the generation, analysis and use of disaggregated data that help to better target the most vulnerable children and families with inclusive policies.
Solutions
The long-term vision of change is that the most vulnerable children and adolescents are protected from extreme poverty through systems and policies that address multiple deprivations across the life cycle.
Using a multi-sectoral approach, UNICEF will provide technical support to the relevant ministries/institutions to address structural vulnerabilities, strengthen institutional arrangements for effective management of social protection programmes and reduce child poverty. In Suriname, it will focus on mapping of social protection interventions and development of relevant policies.
UNICEF will support both Governments in creating updated measurements for monetary and multidimensional poverty.
UNICEF will support the publication of annual budget briefs to monitor public investments in children, and the identification of key spending bottlenecks through review and tracking of public expenditures.
It will support costing exercises to identify financial gaps and fiscal space analyses. Joint advocacy for increased spending on children will include international financial institutions, United Nations partners and CSOs.
UNICEF will support strengthening of national capacities to collect, analyse and use real-time, high-quality data on poverty, deprivation and inequalities to monitor the situation of children, child poverty, progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the effectiveness of social sector programmes.