Breaking Barriers to Access Social Protection: a review of Save the Children’s approach in Nepal

This study is a review of the interventions developed by Save the Children to improve people’s access to government social protection programmes in Nepal.

Securing access to social security allowances (SSAs) in Nepal is among the key components of the Child Sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) project in Nepal. The five main activities under this component are identification of eligibility through household surveys; awareness-raising; strengthening ward capacity for handling management information systems and digital registration; providing handholding support to beneficiaries; and strengthening transparency and accountability.

While awareness of SSAs is quite high in Nepal, the main factors driving exclusion are lack of information about the process, lack of documentation and distance-related costs of access. The CSSP approach is designed to address these factors, and there is some evidence that CSSP activities have been key to achieving extensive coverage of the child grant in intervention districts as compared to other non-project districts. Further, while local governments are crucial last- mile service providers under Nepal’s federal framework, their low administrative capacity impacts social protection uptake, making the project’s focus to support them highly relevant. In providing this support, the project has been able to coordinate effectively with other strategic development partners to ensure overall programming coherence and complementarities, thereby avoiding duplication of effort.
The sustainability and scalability of the project interventions depend on broader developments in the country. For instance, there is currently no functional mechanism to identify gaps in coverage within the national policy framework – a lacuna the project fills through its eligibility mapping component. However, over the medium term, the project will need to monitor ongoing and planned reforms closely, particularly through following World Bank and UNICEF engagements with the Government of Nepal.