Community of Practice on Employment and Social Safety Nets

Status: Completed

Tags: Egypt / Jordan / Morocco / Palestinian Authority / Tunisia / Lebanon / MENA Region / Employment / Knowledge / Social Protection / Training / 2015 / 2014 / 2013

Lead Organizations

The World Bank.

Partners

The community has been supported by the MENA Multi-donor Trust Fund, which includes Denmark, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), Finland, Norway and the World Bank.

Partners also include the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) in 2013/2014, the International Monetary Fund-Middle East (IMF/CEF) in 2013/2014, and the Center for Mediterranean Integration (CMI) since 2015.

Challenges

The MENA region has recently been affected by several overlapping systemic and unpredictable shocks that, coupled with a large and growing youth bulge, have led to high unemployment (especially among high-skilled youth), poor working conditions, and reduced available income among the most vulnerable. As such, post Arab Spring, many countries in the Middle East and North Africa region have begun to re-define, reform, and scale-up their social programs. In this context, policy makers in the region are eager to learn from each other and to change the rules of the game, while identifying best practices that can be adapted to their country’s context.

Program Objective

Within this context, the Middle East and North Africa Community of Practice on Employment and Social Safety Nets (“the community”) has been an instrument to facilitate south-south knowledge exchanges initially in five countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq, and Yemen), creating a space for practitioners from the region to share their operational experience, knowledge, and best practices on issues related to the design and implementation of employment and social safety nets programs.

Selected Results

The work on this “community” is focused on three main axes:

Operationalization: this axis seeks to establish and deliver a community of practitioners in the areas of employment programs and safety nets that will interact regularly to share operation knowledge in relation to the design and implementation of social programs. This entails identifying the government officials and other potential participants, the specific topics, the experts, and facilitating their regular communication and interaction.

Knowledge dissemination: this axis seeks to effectively disseminate international best practices for the design and implementation of employment and Social Safety Nets (SSN) programs through regular videoconference (VC) meetings (once every two months), workshops and study tours.

Knowledge generation: this axis seeks to document the knowledge that is shared within the community through the generation of a series of policy notes and “how-to-guides/manuals” that will provide guidelines to practitioners on how to improve specific aspects of SSN and employment programs.

Since 2013, more than 270 different government officials from over 33 different government agencies and institutions in the region have benefited from knowledge activities conducted by the community. A total of 10 virtual workshops and 5 study tours have been organized, as follows:

Study tours:

Virtual workshops: