Inclusive Social Protection

The issue faced

Dimensions of child poverty related to education, shelter, water and sanitation, child labor, child marriage must be addressed in the light of the three broad categories of child rights, i.e., provision, protection, and participation. In this regard, material poverty is preventing many children in Iran from achieving their maximum physical, mental, spiritual, and social development. Girls living in rural areas are significantly worse off than their male counterparts in the same regions and than their female peers in urban areas. Meaningful State intervention has been constrained by a lack of reliable data, outdated policy instruments, and legislative gaps, with endeavors in this area often marked by suboptimal targeting and a lack of focus on children’s rights.

Delivering implementation efforts that are guided by a data-informed realignment of priorities, targets, indicators, monitoring mechanisms will improve resource optimization and inform allocations. UNICEF has demonstrated in several pilot projects how vulnerable children and households can disproportionally benefit from such an approach, with the scaling up of effective and targeted interventions leading to improved outcomes for a greater number of children across Iran.

The actions taken

UNICEF is supporting the Government of Iran to enhance efficient and inclusive social protection systems and services that reach and protect the most vulnerable households and their children. Key interventions to this end include:

Sharpening the ability of the national social protection system to identify and adeptly target the most vulnerable households with children with tailored solutions.
Conducting advocacy among policymakers to deploy data tools, such as the multidimensional child poverty index, to crystallize target areas with precision and design smart, responsive poverty-alleviation strategies.
Socializing public finance management principles and applying a child-rights-based approach to public finance for children.
Mapping the needs of children with disabilities and reformulating service provision to ensure adequate inclusive health, education, and protection services.
Enabling household financial resilience by designing Learning to Earning (L2E) programmes to equip children and adolescents with income-generating skillsets that are relevant to the labor market.
Establishing a national real-time monitoring system focused on children’s vulnerabilities within the social protection programmes, to inform rapid interventions in challenging situations.
Generating evidence and situation analyses on children in Iran for informed decision-making.

The partners engaged

UNICEF partners involved in the implementation of the programme in this focus area include the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare (MCLSW) including the State Welfare Organization (SWO), the Ministry of Interior (MOI), the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI), and the Ministry of Justice.

The impact sought

Children must have access to clean water, nutrition, education, and basic health and protection services. The indicated UNICEF actions aim to help to remove obstacles caused by poverty and deprivations to enable all children in Iran to enjoy an equal chance to achieve their potential. The actions also continue UNICEF efforts to strengthen the effectiveness and inclusivity of existing social protection mechanisms and link them to positive social outcomes for the most vulnerable children. They will help foster a policy environment where child poverty is prioritized, and which leads to a society characterized by equitably shared opportunities and sufficient protection of each and every member.

Monitoring and Accountability

In adherence to principles of accountability, UNICEF enriches its programme designs and adaptations through systematic assessment and monitoring of the child’s rights deprivations, operating environment, partnerships and progress towards planned results. The implementation of Harmonised Approach to Cash Transfers (HACT) ensures both financial and programmatic compliance through a combination of micro and macro assessments, spot checks, audits and programmatic visits. Leveraging sophisticated and integrated enterprise platforms and tools, UNICEF maintains a consistent monitoring of its programme implementation assessing quality and coverage, identifying risks and challenges, highlighting best practices and lessons learned, fostering stakeholder participation and engagement and conducting end user monitoring of supplies. Additionally, UNICEF remains committed to its costed evaluation plan which includes external evaluations of its projects, partnerships, and/or strategies primarily aiming to enhance relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability of its programmes.