​The core objective of social protection programming is to ensure that people are able to meet their basic needs – food, clothing, shelter, and so on. But social protection also has the potential to have direct impacts on people’s capacity to achieve a secure and sustainable independent livelihood and can have economy-wide effects.

These experiences have been synthesised in a number of places to start to identify the key design and implementation features that maximise synergies between social protection and economic development. However, despite this growing literature, there is a paucity of guidance for policy-makers, programme designers and implementers on how social protection programmes can be strengthened to better support the poorest by promoting economic opportunities, sustainable livelihoods and economic development at the micro level.

This guidance note aims to support the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) advisers and programme staff to maximise the synergies between social protection and economic development by:

·       identifying what people working on social protection need to know before they design and implement programmes

·       identifying a range of approaches aimed at maximising the synergies between social protection and economic development

·       showing which social protection programme design features are most likely to help enhance economic development

·       identifying which actions can most quickly and simply help to maximise synergies between social protection and economic development

·       describing how the term ‘graduation’ fits the wider picture of economic development and sustainably improving livelihoods.

Rachel Slater, Anna McCord, Nicholas Mathers