Six Big Ideas: How Financial Services Can Improve Social Protection Delivery

This Focus Note offers six ‘big ideas’ for how funders of social protection programs can improve delivery of cash transfers in fragile contexts. Leveraging the financial sector for cash transfers improves outcomes for both programs and recipients. This allows faster, safer, and more cost-efficient transfers, enhances transparency and accountability, and improves communication and grievance redressal for recipients.  

Leveraging the financial sector also opens the door for low-income individuals to access and use a suite of financial products, such as savings, credit, insurance, and payments, helping them manage risk and improve resilience to future shocks. Drawing on emerging evidence from highly fragile contexts, the paper presents ways that social protection funders, through governments and implementing partners, can invest to achieve these gains.  

For improving the shared infrastructure supporting cash transfers:  

• Support more open government systems to improve efficiency at scale.
• Seed civic tech champions to help build local delivery capacity.
• Invest early in the building blocks of future government delivery systems.

For improving delivery of cash transfers at the last mile:

• Support private sector investment in financial access points for hard-to-reach areas.
• Create pathways for better leveraging informal money transfers.
• Support community engagement in delivery.