The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) was founded in 2002 as a result of an agreement between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Government of Brazil. It was created with the objective of promoting the exchange of experiences, knowledge and technical and institutional capacities for the design, formulation and evaluation of development policies that contribute to inclusive growth, poverty and inequality reduction and human development.
The Centre began its activities in 2004 and, since then, it has been providing advisory services to countries worldwide, receiving study tours from policy makers, hosting international research fellows and interns, facilitating capacity- strengthening and knowledge-sharing through training, conferences and various publication series, as well as building networks of researchers and practitioners on development policies.
Since 2013, the Resident Representative of UNDP Brazil’s Country Office also acts as IPC-IG Director.
The Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), a think-tank under the Ministry of Economy, is the focal point of the Brazilian Government at the IPC-IG. Ipea also physically hosts the IPC-IG and contributes through the participation of its researchers in the Centre’s activities.
The UNDP and Ipea work together to ensure that the IPC-IG can offer world class knowledge and expertise through its services in five main areas: social protection; technological innovation; inclusive growth; sustainable development and poverty reduction strategies.
Work on social protection responses to COVID-19 The IPC-IG research team has built an extensive mapping of developing countries social protection responses to Covid-19 since March 2020 with the support from the UNDP and GIZ. The mapping uses the framework developed by the IPC-IG jointly with Valentina Barca and Rodolfo Beazley and presented in the
second webinar on the COVID-19 social protection responses on the socialprotection.org platform. The mapping covers developing countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern and South Africa and Asia and Pacific. The mapping documents and classifies the measures by social protection components and instruments, linkages with existing programmes, changes in coverage, adequacy or other implementation changes, legal changes and financing aspects. The mapping matrix is currently being formatted to be publicly available by the end of 2020.
This effort has contributed to and also benefited from synergies with other projects in which the IPC-IG has partnered with UNICEF regional offices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and South Asia (SA) to monitor policy responses and assess potentialities for further improvement. We acknowledge the support form UNICEF Regional Offices and Country Offices in the three regions as well as the support from UNDP/RSCA for the Africa mapping.
As a result of our partnership with UNICEF Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean two technical notes social protection responses to COVID-19 pandemic have been produced, the
1st being focused on Social Assistance (especially cash transfer and school feeding related measures) and the
2nd being focused on Social Insurance and Labour Market Interventions. These two notes are part of a series of four publications being elaborated in partnership with UNICEF LAC Regional Office and are now available in Spanish on socialprotection.org.
In the MENA region a technical note has been produced within the scope of an ongoing initiative of the Regional UN Issue-Based Coalition on Social Protection (IBC-SP). The mapping was conducted online by regional UN agencies (under the former Regional UNDG Group) and was updated until June 22 by the IPC-IG research team, who analysed the social assistance, social insurance and humanitarian responses to the pandemic in the MENA region. The report is available in
English and
Arabic on socialprotection.org. In addition, the IPC-IG has been providing technical assistance to UNICEF Country Offices in the region (including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan), supporting countries to assess the impacts of the pandemic, enhance shock-responsive social protection and strengthen capacity to scale-up national programmes.
The IPC-IG has just recently released a research report
‘Socio-economic impacts of COVID-19, policy responses and the missing middle in South Asia’, produced within the scope of a partnership with UNICEF Regional Office in SA. The paper examines the epidemiological evolution and socio-economic impacts of COVID-19, as well as responses by governments in South Asia during the first five months of the pandemic, with a particular focus on understanding main challenges to reach out to the missing middle.
Spin offs of this research include 8 One Pagers dedicated to country specific analysis. In addition, the IPC-IG also provided help-desk technical assistance support to 7 UNICEF Country Offices in SA region, supporting informed decision-making processes on social protection at the national level. Some of these took the form of Reports which are being shared in this e-Conference on a
Virtual Booth organized by UNICEF ROSA. Finally, another front of collaboration was through a Webinar Series titled ‘
Social Protection in South Asia - the landscape before COVID-19, a snapshot into responses to the crisis and the paths ahead’, which has been jointly presented by IPC-IG and UNICEF specialists in South Asia.
See more on IPC-IG work on Social Protection & COVID-19:Feel free to reach out to our team at ipc@ipc-undp.org
https://ipcig.org/
