DEVELOPMENT
The international community adopted a broad-based economic growth strategy for eliminating systemic poverty, and declared social safety protection, social safety valves and nets as essential elements of the framework for fighting poverty. Education and health rights are not only essential for Social Protection but these are also important drivers of economic growth, development, and achieving equitable distribution of income and wealth.
A special focus was laid upon economic reforms in 1980s which were taken as stimulants for economic growth, with special emphasis upon adjustments, while social impacts and the situations of individual nations were ignored and not taken into account. However, by the late 1990s (in the era of post Washington Consensus) the focus was gradually shifted towards a model of economic growth that included more attention to relieving constraints that were binding to individual countries, including specific provisions for social welfare and protection. Down the road, it has also been recognised that social safety nets alone cannot serve to fight poverty without sound macroeconomic policies that enhance sustainable growth.
Social safety nets perform three major functions: to alleviate and reduce poverty, to manage risk and protect vulnerable groups against various shocks, and to insure an acceptable level of wealth and income distribution. Different policies and programmes may be brought in for delivering in all these fields but all these have an intricate relationship with each other. State has attained paramount importance in resource allocation and income distribution and huge responsibility lies on it for providing all basic needs and support for her citizens. World Development Report has defined equity as having equal opportunities to pursue a life of their choosing and be spared from extreme deprivation in outcomes.
Safety nets not only ensure equal opportunities but also contribute to sustainable development and economic growth. They are the guardians of justice and equality. The equal distribution of social goods such as education, health and shelter, are the key elements in human needs and aspirations and the concept is central to a just society. An ideal social safety net programme should include the composition of vulnerable groups, as well as financial, political, cultural and institutional constraints. Success of safety net depends upon the extent to which benefits: (1) reduce poverty and the number of the poor from falling deeper into poverty, (2) target the most vulnerable, (3) protect the income/assets of the unemployed or working poor, (4) impact equity and income distribution, and (5) are feasible and sustainable over the long term given political and cultural realities.
Activation is one of the key social policy trends in developed countries and activation programmes fall within the broader paradigm of “active social policy”. In this perspective, creation and bringing favourable conditions for ensuring social participation are the central values of the state’s social policies. According to this principle, the state should seek to ensure that the standard of living of individual citizens is not contingent on their labour market status. This gives way to the concept of social citizenship which has two aspects. First, it signifies a shift in the understanding of citizenship; that is, the above-mentioned shift of perspective from the social safety net to active participation in society. Second, increasingly citizenship is associated with civil society rather than the state.
Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) also play an important part in many welfare states in preventing social exclusion of the underprivileged citizens. Such enterprises are supposed to design and provide jobs, especially keeping the poor and downtrodden individuals in mind, who are accommodated keeping in view their job needs. These jobs are often subsidised indefinitely with public sector funds, and therefore the work of persons employed by WISEs is often perceived as connected to welfare. For years, social enterprises were a form of community-organisation for economic purposes that involved persons who found it difficult to grow strong roots on the labour market, but who nonetheless had the prerequisite skills and limited financial resources.
Various social safety interventions were made by successive governments in the past two decades but those were also manipulated politically and many deserving masses were deprived from benefitting by such schemes.
Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) presently in action, is providing financial assistance to needy and poor families based on poverty survey conducted many years ago, which was also not free from manipulation, which is why there is a need to conduct a genuine poverty survey. It is the dire need of the hour that more social safety programmes are launched by adopting the concept of social citizenship in the country. Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has launched several initiatives for extending social safety nets in the province, which include projects on state children, shelter homes, gender reforms, health, and food cards, for extending support to the underprivileged population of the province.
The writer works at the Social Welfare and Women Development
Department, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
