Linking social protection with complementary services: approaches and country innovations

While cash transfers have become almost synonymous with social protection over the last few decades, a comprehensive social protection system requires much more than cash to address risks and mitigate adverse shocks. Cash transfer programmes remain the flagship poverty-targeted social protection in many countries, but there has been a recent impetus to expand social services to vulnerable populations using these programmes as the anchor, so-called cash plus approaches. This chapter provides a framework for different approaches to cash plus programming and presents three case studies that illustrate these different approaches and their relative effectiveness. The examples are Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme; Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty Programme; and Kenya’s National Safety Net Programme. The chapter concludes with a reflection on cash plus as an intermediate step toward a comprehensive social protection system.