Social assistance programmes

Social assistance programmes (SAPs) are usually government led programmes that aim primarily to augment the incomes and resilience of poor families. Ongoing SAPs can be scaled up and adapted to address urgent humanitarian needs and strengthen the resilience of communities for the prevention of worsening vulnerability and malnutrition for children and women in humanitarian and fragile contexts.

For the prevention of undernutrition social assistance programmes must be deliberately designed to address maternal and young child nutrition, with tailored activities to achieve this goal.

Nutrition response design and implementation strategies should include linkages with contextually relevant and appropriate social assistance programmes, where available.

• Targeting of social assistance programmes should consider including vulnerable households with PBWG and/or young children (U2 or U5).
• Transfers should be designed to promote access to a quality diet. This may include complementing the household transfer with individual supplementation specifically designed for pregnancy and breastfeeding or for young children, in the form of cash and/or in–kind assistance, including the provision of food supplements where appropriate.
• Evidence shows that nutritional impact is greater when the cash transfer or other form of assistance is delivered in a predictable, regular and timely manner.
• Size and type of transfer based on good understanding of needs and availability/accessibility/cost of appropriate foods.
• Social assistance programme interventions are more likely to improve maternal and child nutrition when they include a strong social and behaviour change component that is designed to address knowledge and practice gaps around food purchasing, feeding practices and use of resources for feeding young children. Including PBWG in humanitarian cash/voucher transfer interventions is likely to increase their access to services and improve the quality of their diets via enhanced purchasing power. It is important to foster linkages between social assistance programmes and other health and nutrition–specific programmes, such as the management of acute malnutrition and the provision of micronutrient supplements, to comprehensively protect nutritional status.
• Design of SAPs that consider the strengthening of women’s empowerment and decision–making in household spending in purchasing and feeding nutritious complementary foods and in accessing healthcare can also improve nutrition impacts.
• The transfer provided through social assistance can increase the consumption of a more nutritious diet, but to ensure improvements in the access, affordability, availability and stability of nutritious foods, linkages must be forged with food system activities. For example, with agricultural programmes to improve nutritious food availability, or national efforts on food fortification.