Social Protection as a Key Tool in Crisis Management: Learnt Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Social Protection as a Key Tool in Crisis Management: Learnt Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic Hamidou Taffa Abdoul-Azize 1
&
Rehab El Gamil 2
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Worldwide, the social protection programs have become a key tool for policymakers. These programs are executed to achieve multiple objectives such as fighting poverty and hunger, and increasing the resilience of the poor and vulnerable groups towards various shocks. Recently, with the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries started to implement social protection programs to eliminate the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and enhance community resilience. This study aims to explore the current implementation of social protection programs during the COVID-19 pandemic in the most affected countries as well as to provide learned lessons from countries that had not previously considered implementing social protection programs up until the COVID-19 crisis. This review was carried out by searching through WOS, Google Scholar, ILO, World Bank reports, and Aljazeera Television. The search was conducted over literature and systematic reviews on the implementation of social protection programs during previous pandemic crises and especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic. The findings revealed that social protection programs become a flexible and strategic tool to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the study highlighted a lack of comprehensive strategy amongst the countries in executing the social protection programs to respond to COVID-19. Finally, the study concluded with some learned lessons and implications for the practitioners and policymakers in managing future pandemics. Keywords Social protection . Vulnerable groups . Policymakers . COVID-19 pandemic . Learned lessons
Introduction Early at the beginning of 2020, the WHO declared the new epidemic namely “the novel coronavirus disease 2019” as a worldwide public health emergency (Wu et al. 2020). On February 11, 2020, China accounted for about 42,708 infected cases and by 27 July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread over about 216 territories with a total of confirmed cases estimated at 16,114,449 and with about 646,641deaths. The most affected countries are the USA, Brazil, India, Russian, Peru, Chile, UK, Mexico, Spain, Iran, Pakistan, and Italy (WHO 2020).
* Hamidou Taffa Abdoul-Azize [email protected] Rehab El Gamil [email protected] 1
Faculty of Agricultural Economics, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey
2
School of Applied Sciences, Istanbul Gelisim University, Istanbul, Turkey
According to the increasing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries applied different measures such as closing the airports, implementing bans for some commodities and medical products, reducing work time, home quarantine, and curfews. These measures affect the country’s economic sectors and risk to increase social inequality and poverty. Hence, many countries start to implement various SPP to cope with the negative socioeconomic impacts
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