The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for people and governments worldwide, as well as massive new demands for social protection. It has also sparked an extraordinary collective effort to track developments in the field.
socialprotection.org has played a role in that collective effort, hosting a dedicated online community webinars, papers, and conferences devoted to sharing knowledge on COVID-19, extracting analyses of trends from huge datasets, delving into the details of implementation and lessons learned. And most importantly, sharing all of this knowledge to inform more effective responses.
socialprotection.org is reaching the end of a special campaign celebrating its sixth anniversary. In our last episode, we took a broad view of trends, looking at what some of the most important changes have been—as well as considering those that may have received less attention.
This month, we bring you an in-depth view of social protection programmes in India and Botswana. We'll look at how these were adapted and adjusted to meet the challenges of the pandemic, while considering what lasting effects there might be.
In India, the flagship public works programme had to expand rapidly to accommodate increased demand—and it's greatly expanded budget has driven greater convergence with other forms of public assistance. In Botswana, the government announced last year an overhaul of the country’s social protection schemes to increase the provision of systematic protection across the life cycle in response to the COVID-19 experience.
 
Our guests for this episode are:
Rajeev Ahal, Director of Natural Resource Management and Agro-ecology at GIZ India, and
Lillian Mookodi, a Research Fellow in the Human and Social Development Unit at the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA), about the changes on the horizon. Lillian also worked with the United Nations on a new social protection strategy for Botswana building on the experiences during the COVID-19 crisis.
 
Links from the episode:
Botswana National Social Protection Recovery Plan
Impact of COVID-19 on public works programs: policy options in the short and medium term
 
socialprotection.org's Micro-courses:
What is social protection? An introduction
Social protection programmes
Social Protection and Rural Poverty
Adaptive Social Protection
Integrated and digital social protection information systems