Deadline: 15-Aug-22
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), Arbetsförmedlingen (the Swedish Public Employment Service) and the Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI) hereby invite and welcome you to nominate candidates for this International Training Programme on Social Protection for Sustainable Development.
This training programme will contribute to the development of the social protection system in your country, they would like to invite your institution to nominate qualified candidates for participation in the programme.
The programme is specially designed for persons qualified to participate in reform processes and holding a position in their home organisations with mandate to conduct a process of change. It offers support to strengthen, adapt and maintain capacity over time in order for the participant’s organisation to define and achieve goals both short and long term. Participants from each country will work together to implement progressively a medium-term change programme that strengthens the capacity of the national social protection system to work more effectively.
Objectives
- Globally, social protection represents one of the fastest growing policy sectors—in part, because its main aim—tackling poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion—strengthens the foundations for positive change around the world. Severe deprivation, unmitigated risk and discrimination create social problems that can paralyse action.
- Providing the most deprived households with income support makes both consumer markets and labour markets work better for the poor. Protecting people against the worst consequences of shocks enables productive risk-taking, including job search, one of the highest yielding investments for households living in poverty.
- Social inclusion opens the door to vital opportunities and offers a platform on which change agents can build better policies, programmes and systems. A global evidence base today demonstrates social protection’s powerful role supporting inclusive social development, decent and productive employment and equitable economic growth.
- The International Training Programme will aim to expand and improve the effectiveness of national social protection systems, tackling exclusion, promoting gender equality and strengthening developmental impact. The programme builds the capacity of teams integrating multiple government ministries, public agencies and non-governmental organisations in the partner countries to identify, design, finance, implement, monitor and evaluate change programmes. The programme aims to is to better deliver social protection to meet the identified objectives of national policy stakeholders, including tackling poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion while strengthening opportunities for decent and productive employment.
- In five years, country teams will work on the change programme in sequence with the ambition to fully operationalise the programme after five years for the long-term. The adopted approaches will align with Swedish guiding principles for development cooperation and include values for human rights and the integration of a gender perspective for equal rights of men and women.
Focus Areas
The core modules of the ITP will include training in seven main areas:
- Rights-based and life cycle frameworks for social protection systems,
- The design and implementation of social protection systems to ensure social inclusion,
- Strengthening developmental impacts, by integrating intersectoral initiatives to multiply social protection impacts and support the SDGs (“Social Protection Plus”), with a particular focus on decent and productive employment,
- Enabling social protection to promote gender equality,
- Financing and co-financing social protection reforms, expansion and integration, and
- Monitoring and evaluating social protection systems to enable evidence-based change.
- Social protection responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and lessons from the global crisis.
Themes
In addition, the ITP will innovate specific modules and training components to support the specific change programmes identified by partner country teams and will include three cross cutting themes:
- gender equality;
- good governance, anti-corruption and integrity and
- environment and sustainability.
Benefits
- Knowledge and enhanced capacity on social protection systems and their role in tackling poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion while strengthening inclusive social development and decent and productive employment.
- Knowledge of the value of building inter-ministerial and inter-agency initiatives as instruments for more effectively integrating social protection with other developmental sectors, including health, education, employment and others.
- To initiate and manage sustainable reform processes building more effective social protection systems.
- Capacity and knowledge to plan and implement a project for change.
- The programme will provide the participant with an in-depth understanding of:
- the role of comprehensive social protection systems in promoting social and economic development,
- how integrating social protection instruments with developmental interventions in health, education, livelihoods and other sectors can tackle complex problems and achieve comprehensive outcomes,
- knowledge of policies and tools for more effectively designing and integrating social protection policies, programmes and systems,
- the potential of comprehensive social protection systems to support decent and productive employment,
- cross-cutting perspectives, including gender equality, anticorruption and environmental/climate issues,
- the ability to identify and analyse challenges and problems in the social protection system in the home country and to suggest corrective measures,
- the ability to initiate, organise and implement a sustainable project for change based on development priorities,
- an established network for exchanging experiences and support between participants.
Eligible Countries
The following countries are invited: Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Eligibility Criteria
- This ITP aims to include government officials and others who work at a strategic level on change in their organisations and for the public good. Participants can apply from ministries, government agencies and departments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
- Participants must be able to participate in the reform processes in the social protection sector in their countries. They should have the power and resources to initiate and implement development projects that result in change furthering the goals of this ITP.
- Qualifications are university or other post-secondary education and relevant work experience. Participants must be officially nominated by their own organisations and in some cases by authorities. Nominating organisations and the selected candidates must ensure their commitment to participate in all phases of the programme. A Memorandum of Understanding will be signed by the participants organisations and the Economic Policy Research Institute.
- In order for the participants to be fully dedicated to the programme, family members are not allowed to accompany participants to the programme.
- The training programme will be organised and conducted in English.
For more information, visit https://training.sida.se/luvitportal/activities/ActivityDetails_ext.aspx?inapp=1&id=153