By The World Bank

There is little doubt that the magnitude of the social protection response to COVID-19 is of historical proportions. According to our research on measures taken by 215 countries and territories, at least $800 billion have been invested in social protection in the past nine months, a level 22% higher than during the great recession of 2008–09. This amounts to more than 1,400 social protection measures, of which about one-third took the form of cash transfers reaching over 1.1 billion people, or 14% of the world’s population. Relative to pre-COVID levels, cash transfer benefits nearly doubled and coverage grew by 240%, on average.

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Yet “large scale” doesn’t mean “adequate”: our analysis shows that in the countries examined, cash transfer programs lasted 3.3 months on average, with a mere 7% of them being extended; 30% of programs were one-off payments; and only one-quarter reached more than one-third of the population. In low-income countries, spending per capita amounted to a scant average of $6 per capita, which is 87 times lower than in high-income countries.

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The crisis is shedding light on longstanding holes in current social protection systems – at the very bottom of the distribution, but also in its ‘middle.’ As such, there are concerns that as the crisis winds down, so will much-needed social protection programs.

Could the pandemic offer an opportunity to move the needle in scaling-up social protection more permanently?

To address the question, we need to unpack six pre-pandemic bottlenecks that are inhibiting coverage extension. These relate to mindsets and preferences; sectoral priorities; institutions; delivery; financing; and politics. Let’s examine if and how each of these dimensions were affected by the COVID-19 response.

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