Universal social protection is a precondition for eradicating poverty and realizing human rights, beyond growth imperatives. Access to social protection ensures that individuals can meet their basic needs and maintain a minimum standard of living throughout their life course, whether faced with idiosyncratic social risks or large-scale crises. However, even today, 3.8 billion people survive without any social protection coverage and an even larger number remains inadequately protected. This has raised alarm bells, especially in an era of demographic shifts, labour market transformations, and climate crises that have intensified cycles of risk and shock. While countries have made some progress in building up national social protection systems and expanding coverage, in line with their national policy and legal frameworks, as well as their commitments under international human rights law and the SDGs, yet efforts to increase coverage by at least 2 percentage points every year remains to be achieved.
230. The Roadmap’s proposals for universal social coverage, developed in tandem with contributions from the ILO, challenge the dominant policy paradigm in four ways:
(a) It shifts the focus from poverty alleviation to poverty prevention. Rather than intervening only after people fall into poverty, universal social protection guarantees income security and access to health care across the life course, thereby reducing vulnerability and preventing poverty from occurring in the first place.
(b) It insists on rights-based institutionalized solutions through national social protection systems based on principles of solidarity, sustainable and equitable financing, good governance, and social dialogue. This ensures that access to basic income security and health care is guaranteed as a matter of right, rather than being contingent on economic performance.
(c) It moves from fragmented, residual and narrowly targeted “safety nets” insufficient for addressing widespread vulnerability to rights-based universal social protection systems that are entitlements with the ability to provide comprehensive and adequate protection for all, including those currently excluded.
(d) It recognizes social protection policy not as a residual policy area limited to ‘mopping up’ the fallouts of economic policy, but as an essential social infrastructure working hand in hand with other economic and social policies, including employment and labour protection, formalization, fiscal and care policies, as well as investment in essential services.
