Better Assistance News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

In fragile and conflict-affected north-eastern Nigeria, social assistance delivery has evolved from a near absence of any form of systematic and organised approach to a promising attempt to coordinate and deliver services to the most vulnerable populations in the region. After over a decade of interventions by both national and international actors, the complex humanitarian situation remains protracted and precarious, making social assistance an urgent priority.

Conflict and political instability are major drivers of deprivation and displacement across the Horn of Africa. This is exemplified by the unfolding situation in Sudan, where humanitarian need is escalating rapidly as competing factions struggle violently for power. In a region with such high levels of poverty and vulnerability, where access to the essentials of life is compromised for many, a key policy response is social protection.

Rachel Sabates-Wheeler’s profile on The Conversation

Including the most marginalised people in development research and programming is crucial to achieving the compelling global call to ‘leave no-one behind’. However, this is not always straightforward or easy to achieve. Our research to date has found that there are time and resourcing needs, barriers from attitudes and power dynamics, and intrinsic tensions that must be navigated to build genuinely inclusive processes.

‘Resilience’ has become a firmly established part of the aid lexicon. Overall, global policy discourse recognises the potential of social protection to contribute to resilience outcomes, and highlights many examples of mechanisms to achieve this. Resilience as a term is used frequently as an objective or indicator in vulnerability-reduction interventions, including in protracted crises.