Zakat is an obligatory Islamic practice that promotes redistribution of wealth in Muslim-majority countries. It functions by channelling resources from those who have enough to those considered deprived. This redistributive mandate places it in close proximity to non-contributory social assistance. Yet, in practice, zakat programmes vary widely in their legal status, governance arrangements, benefit design, and coordination with state-led social protection systems. This article asks: under what conditions can zakat contribute to the realization of social protection floors (SPFs) in national social protection systems? Drawing on a qualitative comparative case study of Jordan and Pakistan and using the International Labour Organization's SPF framework as the main analytical lens, the analysis is structured around four SPF-related dimensions: institutional governance, coverage and targeting, adequacy of benefits, and integration with national social protection frameworks. The findings suggest that zakat can complement national floors by extending support to poor and vulnerable groups, but its contribution remains conditional. Importantly, zakat cannot substitute for state-guaranteed social protection as a legal entitlement. Its relevance lies in complementing rights-based systems in financing and/or delivery, provided that governance, transparency and targeting safeguards are maintained. In both Jordan and Pakistan, limited coverage and adequacy, fragmented coordination, and reliance on discretionary beneficiary selection constrain SPF-alignment. Moreover, weak trust and governance challenges undermine compliance and predictability, particularly where zakat revenues depend on voluntary contributions or are vulnerable to evasion. The article concludes that zakat's SPF potential is most likely to be realized when governance and transparency mechanisms strengthen public trust, targeting rules are clear and monitored, benefits are predictable and closer to basic needs, and coordination is institutionalized through shared systems such as interoperable registries and consistent eligibility verification.
In 2004, the book Financing social protection was published by the International Labour Office in collaboration with the International Social Security Association. The book showcased a pedagogical philosophy which underlined that learning and knowledge production are not sequential activities but simultaneous ones, and that young professionals are capable of contributing from the outset of their careers. This philosophy is the intellectual and institutional thread that connects the 2004 volume to the five articles selected from the finalists of The Michael Cichon Graduate Award for Outstanding Thesis - 2025 that appear in this themed issue. Since 2004, investment in education and research has strengthened the ability to simulate, evaluate impacts, and analyse social protection institutions comparatively. But in practice, billions of people remain without adequate coverage. Institutional reach and coverage gaps continue. Innovative new ways of thinking about issues of policy and administration, along with innovative new thinkers, are needed. Grounded in rigorous research methods and solid policy analysis, the articles in this themed issue share a commitment to bridging analysis and implementation and are committed to rights-based approaches and to human dignity. However, the approach taken here is also pragmatic. In this regard, the papers mirror the rigorous analysis and research that Michael Cichon's life work emphasized as necessary to help argue the case for and promote the development of rights-based social protection for all.
This article evaluates the impact of foreign aid on multidimensional health outcomes in developing countries. Using 26 indicators from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 2 and SDG 3), the study constructs six composite health dimensions and analyse panel data on 131 countries (2000-2021) with fixed-effects cross-lagged panel models. The results show significant positive effects of official development assistance (ODA) on reproductive fatalities, burden of disease, and environmental mortality, but a negative effect on health system capacity. The study concludes that ODA alleviates specific health burdens but lacks transformative power to achieve long-term resilience and sustainable development. The study recommends prioritizing health infrastructure and system building as a fundamental component of global development efforts.
This article examines Sudan's state-led social protection system by conducting a mapping of the country's main social protection schemes, drawing on legislative documents and secondary reports as well as the 2022 Sudan Labor Market Panel Survey. Focusing on three main programmes: Zakat, the National Health Insurance Fund and the National Pension and Social Insurance Fund, the article captures programme objectives, eligibility rules, and operational definitions to assess coverage, targeting accuracy, and benefit adequacy. Findings reveal systematically low coverage, substantial targeting failures, and benefits well below subsistence thresholds. Vulnerable populations including internally displaced persons, camp residents, and conflict-affected regions, face severe exclusion despite greatest need. Sudan's social protection system remains trapped in minimal absorptive functions, constrained by high informality, institutional fragmentation, and protracted conflict. These findings contribute to empirical evidence on social protection in fragile contexts and point to a set of practical reconstruction priorities.
With forcibly displaced persons reaching 123.2 million people globally in 2024, host low- and middle-income countries face a dual social protection coverage challenge: including new populations while their own systems cover less than a third of their citizens. Focusing on the case of Colombia, this article uses a mixed-methods approach, combining tax-benefit microsimulation and expert interviews, to assess the poverty impacts of universal-like cash transfers for Colombians as well as for migrants and refugees from Venezuela resident in Colombia. While large UBI-like transfers can dramatically reduce poverty (by up to 15 percentage points (pp) for Colombians and 27 pp for Venezuelans), budget-neutral scenarios are detrimental to the poorest households. The qualitative evidence points to a gradual targeted universalism approach prioritizing specific life-cycle risks as the most viable strategy in fiscally constrained, high-informality contexts.
Gender responsiveness has emerged as a prominent concept in social protection policy, increasingly shaping donor agendas and national strategies. Yet despite widespread usage, we lack well-defined analytical frameworks that allow for gender-responsiveness assessments of entire national social protection systems. This article addresses that gap by constructing and applying an analytical framework that integrates gender-responsive programming features with a framing analysis of the normative assumptions and discursive constructs underpinning social protection design. It applies this two-dimensional framework to the Ethiopian social protection system, combining document analysis and key informant interviews conducted in early 2022. The article thereby offers a time-bound structural assessment of the system at a specific point in time. The findings reveal that while Ethiopia exhibits a meaningful range of gender-responsive programming features, the underlying framing in both policy documents and practitioners' discourse continues to institutionalize traditional gender roles. Women are cast primarily as mothers and caretakers rather than as autonomous rights-holders. Economic empowerment goals are systematically reinterpreted as instruments of child and household welfare. This framing limits the system's transformative potential and may also render gender provisions fiscally precarious. This baseline structural mapping can inform future comparative and longitudinal work on gender and social protection systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Utilizing data from the 2019-2021 Guangdong Thousand-Village Survey, this study analyzes the targeting efficiency of the contemporary social assistance programmes and empirically investigates their effects on income inequality among rural households. We show that social assistance helps alleviate the relative income deprivation of impoverished rural households. However, many of them have no access to social assistance, with the under-coverage rate exceeding 80 per cent. The inclusion error of social assistance further exacerbates income inequality among rural households. Therefore, it is important to improve coordination among different rural social assistance programmes, pay more attention to the invisible poor, and ensure that all eligible households share assistance.
Using an intersectional lens, this mixed-methods study examines how structural barriers in last-mile delivery shape women's access to social protection in cattle-rearing households in urban Gujarat, India, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on survey data from 427 households, interviews with frontline workers, key informants, and a focus group discussion, the study shows that ostensibly neutral last-mile implementation mechanisms can reproduce intersectional exclusions. Digital information dissemination and selective door-to-door outreach tend to disadvantage women without smartphone access and women from historically marginalized caste communities. Administrative requirements linked to identity documentation further constrain access by imposing high opportunity costs and reinforcing women's dependence on male household members. The findings point to the need for information dissemination beyond digital platforms, simplified and flexible administrative processes, and the use of linking organizations to mediate last-mile access.
This article examines the impact of the Argentine pension system on income distribution through a cross-sectional analysis. It considers contributory, non-contributory, and semi-contributory benefits, along with the different financing sources. Using data from the 2017-2018 Encuesta Nacional de Gasto de los Hogares, an accounting incidence approach and various inequality indices are applied to assess the redistributive effect under different scenarios and assumptions. The analysis also decomposes redistribution into intra- and inter-age effects. Results indicate that the pension system had a progressive impact on income distribution during the period analysed, although the extent of this effect varies across the scenarios.
In this article, we study how differential mortality at the socioeconomic level affects inequality within social security in Uruguay, a country with a relatively low incidence of informality and unemployment in the Latin American region. Lower-income workers meet pension access requirements to a lesser extent and are more likely to retire later than higher-income workers. Also, they tend to die younger. Using administrative records, we simulate work histories adjusted by survival probabilities by socioeconomic level. This research found that differential mortality is less important than differences in contribution patterns in Uruguay. The bottleneck is access to benefits at the usual retirement ages.
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) represents a critical pathway toward improved maternal health outcomes, yet causal evidence remains limited in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. This study assesses the impact of UHC expansion on maternal mortality in Morocco using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing with annual data from 2000 to 2023. We estimate a health production function controlling for education, fertility, urbanization, and public health expenditure. Results show that UHC expansion significantly reduces maternal mortality, with a long-run elasticity of -0.179 (p < 0.001). Based on the estimated elasticities, UHC alone explains roughly one quarter of the observed decline in maternal mortality, while combined with public health spending, these two factors account for nearly half of the overall reduction. The findings highlight strong complementarity between financial protection and health investment, providing new econometric evidence of UHC's effectiveness in the MENA region and informing strategies toward Sustainable Development Goal achievement. The study acknowledges methodological limitations including non-significant education and fertility coefficients that diverge from the established literature, likely reflecting ARDL-specific estimation properties and Morocco's institutional context.
The solo self-employed workforce is growing across Europe, a group which often faces greater individual responsibility for retirement preparation than employees. Using a situational strength framework, this study investigates psychological mechanisms behind retirement planning among employees and three types of solo self-employed workers: voluntary, natural, and forced. Based on survey data from 3,450 Dutch workers aged 40-67, a multi-group structural equation model reveals that, compared to employees and other types of solo self-employed workers, future time perspective influences perceived retirement savings adequacy considerably more strongly among voluntary self-employed workers. These findings underscore the situational-contingent nature of retirement planning and highlight the vulnerability of certain self-employed groups in pension policy debates.
This article examines the potential impact of early pension withdrawals from Peru's individual retirement account system. Originally introduced as a policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of large withdrawals were allowed during and after the pandemic. We find that these policies can reduce expected pension wealth by about 40 per cent, but there are important heterogeneous effects. There is a socio-economic gradient in the distribution of pension fund losses, with individuals at the lower end of the income or savings distribution experiencing larger losses. Losses are also higher for men and older people, who have less time to rebuild their pension pots.
In this study, we use unique research data to investigate the risk of exit from the workforce on the grounds of the award of a disability pension under the statutory public-sector pension scheme in Finland. Statistical analysis yields two indicators: the risk for permanent disability retirement and the critical duration of sickness absence days in public-sector occupations. The analysis is based on a logistic regression model where the outcome is retirement on a disability pension, with sickness benefit spells and other individual background information used as covariates. The results underline the importance of minimizing sickness absences and their duration and reveal differences in the risk rate between occupations. We conclude that the proposed risk model is a promising tool that can help employers and the pension industry prevent permanent disability.
Human health is shaped by physiological factors and by social, environmental, behavioural, and political conditions. Annually, occupational risks are a major contributor to a significant number of avoidable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years. Addressing such determinants requires action beyond the health sector, with increasing recognition of the value of multisectoral approaches to achieving health equity. Social protection and occupational health services systems both address these determinants of health and share a public health objective: preventing occupational injuries and diseases, supporting healthcare access, and facilitating rehabilitation. Among social protection schemes, social health protection plays a core role. This scoping review identifies documented linkages between social health protection and occupational health services in the global literature, highlighting both promising practices and coordination gaps between these two sub-systems. Strengthening these linkages through intersectoral policy and practice can reinforce both systems, particularly in the face of global crises such as climate change. To our knowledge, this is the first mapping of the published literature on this issue.
This paper examines disparities in longevity among Spanish retirement pensioners aged 65+, focusing on pension income and gender between 2008 and 2021. Using linked administrative records, we estimate life expectancy and complementary indicators (median, modal age at death, interquartile range). Results show persistent income-related gaps, especially for men, who face both shorter and less predictable lives, while female inequalities are smaller and tend to converge. Compared internationally, Spain displays distinctive narrowings for women but a widen-then-narrow pattern for men. Beyond documenting disparities, the article highlights how each longevity indicator offers distinct policy uses - for actuarial fairness, pension liabilities, and health and elderly care aimed at enhancing the well-being of disadvantaged groups.
The channels through which shocks and stressors affect individual's health and socioeconomic vulnerability are often similar or closely intertwined. Similarly, the effectiveness of the respective responses of social protection and health systems to shocks and stressors are highly interdependent or mutually reinforcing. The effectiveness of a social protection system response in supporting income security and ensuring continuous access to health and other essential services is itself strongly dependent on the ability of the health system to continue delivering quality services. In turn, the effectiveness of public health measures during crises are bolstered by social protection responses that support income security and access to essential services with an impact on nutrition, housing, and other social determinants of health. Yet, such responses are too often implemented in siloes and policies to strengthen those systems are too often competing. In the face of ongoing megatrends that increasingly drive shocks and stressors and enhance vulnerabilities, the article addresses the question of how health and social protection systems can better coordinate to strengthen the resilience of populations.
Resilience is conceptualized as a property of subjects (individuals, families, households, communities, or nations) and is intrinsically linked to coping with and overcoming vulnerability, indicating that subjects may require external assistance during crises. Ukraine's social protection system during the Russian-Ukrainian war has demonstrated sufficient resilience in protecting against life-cycle risks. The State has also responded rapidly to the emergency crisis of war. International humanitarian organizations likewise have responded rapidly with numerous humanitarian aid programmes. However, funding opportunities are diminishing. This requires the most efficient use of limited resources. This study implements a community-oriented approach, with a focus on localization in risk distribution through an analysis of monitoring data produced by international organizations and local research in Ukrainian communities. Key findings include overestimated expectations of family and friend support coupled with underestimated self-reliance (approximately 20 per cent) during 2022-2024. Institutional support (volunteer, public, and international organizations) showed increased significance, while overall self-reliance decreased in favour of external support sources. Future research directions include analysing expected-versus-actual assistance dynamics, investigating social support structure change factors, examining social trust transformation across institutions, and developing optimized support resource distribution programmes.
