The role of Child Benefits in Enabling Family-friendly Policies to Achieve The Triple Bottom Line

About

Policymakers across the Global South today grapple with vital trade-offs involving family-friendly policies. Compelling evidence demonstrates that paid parental leave, breastfeeding breaks, quality childcare and child benefits enable families to provide their children with the best possible start in life, particularly in terms of improved health, education and other dimensions of well-being.1 Finance ministries, however, express concerns about fiscal sustainability and the resource trade-offs affecting economic growth priorities. This note builds a business case for child benefits that not only support families with financial resources, but also integrate with a more comprehensive social protection system that enables intersectoral synergies to support a broad set of development outcomes in addition to the triple bottom line. This note defines ‘child benefits’ as cash transfers provided by governments (or other agents) to families with children for the purpose of tackling poverty and vulnerability and promoting children’s well-being. Households can receive children cash benefits and cash equivalents through cash transfers that target children nutrition, education, health, sanitation and behavior outcomes. If adequate, child benefits complement other components of family-friendly policies to better enable parents and other caregivers to raise healthier, better-educated and happier children. These interventions support comprehensive approaches to early childhood development to nurture children’s cognitive capital, which, by building labour productivity relevant for the twenty-first century knowledge-based economy, represents the main driver of a nation’s future prosperity. Policy decision-makers today face vital choices for the future of economic growth and prosperity in their nations. The most successful countries over the next several decades will recognize now that the future of not only inclusive social development but also equitable economic growth depends more than ever on their investments in these family-friendly policies. This note makes two main points. First, child benefits integrated within a life cycle social protection system deliver for families, for business and for the economy as a whole. Child benefits help transform the character of economic growth into an inclusive and sustainable dynamic that delivers results for children and their families—and prosperity for their communities and their nations. Child benefits within a comprehensive social protection system support the achievement of 14 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Second, child benefits provide the linchpin for a comprehensive social protection system that builds bridges from single-sector policy silos and embraces comprehensive and integrated approaches to inclusive development and economic growth, starting with investments in early childhood that integrate health, education, social care, family benefits, child protection, water and sanitation and other sectors. This strengthens a developmental dynamic that improves the well-being of families, ensures that the private sector prospers, and reinforces a strong national economy.