Social protection for vulnerable communities

Sudden ‘shocks’ such as earthquakes and floods, and slow onset crises, such as crop failures or financial crises, have a severe impact on the livelihoods of people living in poverty or on the fringes of poverty.

These crises can quickly erode hard-won development gains.

In response to this, aid agencies, governments and the UN are focusing on social protection measures to reduce the impact of these events on vulnerable populations.

Social protection helps people prevent, manage and overcome situations that adversely affect their well being.

Social protection is implemented through measures like social assistance and social insurance that provide regular and predictable cash or in-kind payments.

These measures reduce communities’ vulnerability by mitigating their exposure to risks.

Just as accurate, timely information can save lives in a natural disaster, in slow-onset crises, such as a food shortage, timely social protection can stop vulnerable people from slipping further into poverty.

Social protection is easier to deliver if appropriate information architecture is available.

This architecture arms decision-makers with the information they need to provide assistance when and where it is needed most.

To assess how vulnerable a community is before a crisis, up-to-date information is needed about their exposure to hazards, response to crises and changing socio-economic conditions.

Collecting and managing this information in changing situations is challenging, especially if information must be integrated from numerous sources to build a comprehensive picture of what is happening, and where.

We're working with AusAID to build an information framework for Indonesia which links together gazetteers (databases of place names and their locations) with spatial data (information tied to geographic locations) to help deliver the right information from multiple sources to decision makers.

The UN Gazetteer Framework Project is currently its second phase and forms part of the UN's Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative.

The long term goal is to scale up the Indonesian pilot project to build critical global information infrastructure to improve national and global (UN) spatial information access and use.

UN Global Pulse is another global initiative to harness and act on digital signals and information that gauge a population's state of well being.

Australia's overseas aid agency AusAID is co-funding the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure Gazetteer Framework project as part of the Australian Government's G20 commitment and support of the Global Pulse initiative in Indonesia.

 

Read more about the CSIRO - AusAID Research for Development Alliance