Rapid Review of Social Protection; a Gender Perspective

This rapid assessment examines the literature on social protection to determine the gender considerations made in social protection research and the gendered areas of future research in the field. This review was conducted between May and August 2018. Electronic databases were searched to identify records that were published in English between the period of 2008 and 2018. Studies were eligible for inclusion if they were empirical and had both the search terms ‘social’ and ‘protection’ or their various combinations, appearing in the titles of the articles. Grey literature, reports and other non-academic writings were excluded as only empirical studies were eligible. Twelve studies were reviewed and synthesised. The results of this study show that social protection research makes gender considerations and most of the social protection interventions were protective, preventive or promotive measures. Future studies should therefore explore transformative social protection with respect to gender equality and partly because gendered social protection is poorly developed. This rapid review also affirms that despite criticisms, social protection continues to be valuable in addressing poverty and inequalities. However, against this backdrop it is worth noting that social protection is not a panacea and its gender considerations are necessary only to the extent that they do not exacerbate inequalities.