April 2024 – March 2025

STAAR has been tasked with supporting ILO, to improve the functionality of the Social Protection Cash and Voucher Assistance Thematic Working Group (SPCVA TWG or TWG) in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The assignments is undertaking facilitation expertise, technical assistance and coordination support, to enhance effective coordination, integration new actors into these coordination structures, res; n dto shifts in priorities and provide a quality assurance function to the group, while keeping considerations around GESI prioritised.

of sustaining and strengthening a cohesive, hybrid social assistance system amid ongoing violent conflict, while continuing to pave the way for longer term system building.

Social protection “can change social norms and role models – and thus have a gender-transformative effect”. Svenja Schulze, German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development opens this new guidance on the transformative power of social protection to support gender outcomes in crisis contexts.

• An estimated one in five forcibly displaced women in humanitarian crises have been subjected to sexual violence.
• Approximately 11 million girls may not return to school after the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Single female-headed households may have higher expenditures than male-headed households to respond to climate disasters.
• Less than one in five global social protection measures during COVID-19 addressed specific gender inequalities, such as supporting women in informal employment, mitigating risks of violence, and confronting the unequal distribution of care work.
• As inequalities are exacerbated during crises, the guidance note identifies concrete steps how social protection can help reverse, and even transform, the disadvantages faced by women and girls in these contexts.

The guidance note was written by Rebecca Holmes and Paola Pereznieto with valuable inputs from Valentina Barca and Helene Juillard and in consultation with members of the SPIAC-B gender working group. It was produced through STAAR Facility as commissioned by GIZ on behalf of BMZ.

February 2023 – April 2023 (finished)

Nigeria’s National Cash Transfer Office (NCTO) requested STAAR’s support in developing a strategic roadmap for the NCTO, to enable the NCTO to grow sustainably and become institutionalised within the Nigerian government.

The process includes consulting stakeholders to identify needs, assessing CVA approaches for humanitarian challenges, and developing recommendations for the NCVA policy to ensure clarity and effective use of CVA to address these needs.

The assignment provided an assessment of the humanitarian CVA landscape in Nigeria to inform the NCVA policy based on evidence, promote clarity and accountability to the government, and enable humanitarians to utilise different modalities, as feasible and appropriate, to meet humanitarian needs in accordance with humanitarian principles and the commitment to do no harm

March 2024 – June 2024 (finished)

FCDO requested STAAR’s support in developing a roadmap for FCDO’s engagement on Social Protection in South Sudan.

The three-month desk-based analysis aimed to provide FCDO with a comprehensive approach to social protection in South Sudan, focusing on both short-term humanitarian interventions and longer-term resilience strategies. This involved gathering new insights from key actors like UNICEF, UNOPS, and the World Bank, alongside existing evidence of social protection in the country.

The final output offered a set of process-oriented principles to guide FCDO’s engagement and strategy in South Sudan. Although it didn’t meet all of the user’s original expectations, particularly regarding policy influencing recommendations, it provided valuable frameworks to support future decision-making and engagement with key stakeholders in the country.

Social Protection practitioners, decision-makers and researchers have long been using the term ‘system’ when referring to social protection. This paper frames Social Protection as a ‘Solar’ System to demonstrate the building blocks which collectively contribute to the System as a whole. These building blocks are built on three different ‘levels’: Policy, Programme and Implementation / delivery which this paper sets out in detail.