Overview

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been facing and will probably continue to face the reverberating aftershocks of multiple humanitarian crises, unstable social protection financing, rising prices of basic commodities, high unemployment rates, increased civil unrest, and threats of climate change and water scarcity. The global COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the situation and added to the negative socio-economic conditions in the region. Already vulnerable groups such as children, women, persons with disabilities, informal workers, refugees, asylumseekers, internally displaced persons and irregular migrants are being disproportionately affected.

Children in the region are twice as likely as adults to live in monetary poverty and are thus extremely vulnerable to crisis (UNICEF n.d.). Crises also negatively affect delivery of and access to basic social services that are fundamental to child well-being and development, including education, health and nutrition. In addition, girls face the added risk of child marriage during times of crisis and economic hardship (UNFPA and UNICEF 2021; UNICEF 2021a). Women also bear the brunt of shocks, given the realities of gender inequality in the region, as they are more likely to be unemployed.1 If they are employed, they are more likely to earn less than men, lose their livelihoods, be exposed to domestic violence and experience an increase in unpaid care work (Holmes et al. 2020). Women in the Arab States region already spend, on average, 4.7 times more time on unpaid work than men—the largest difference among all regions globally (ESCWA and UN Women 2020). Shock-responsive social protection measures that are not gendersensitive can also result in women’s exclusion (UN Women 2020).

Furthermore, people with disabilities, including those with functional and medical disabilities, are particularly vulnerable to health and economic risks, as they may have underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk of health complications from the pandemic, but also because they are overrepresented among people living in poverty (UNICEF 2020). This is also applicable to older persons, who experience more poverty in older age as work opportunities become more sporadic and pension coverage remains minimal, especially in MENA, where only 27 per cent of older persons receive a pension, compared to 68 per cent globally (Juergens and Galvani 2020). The large number of refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons and irregular migrants (people on the move) due to armed conflicts and wars in MENA are also especially vulnerable to crisis due to limited access to labour markets and national social assistance programmes and a lack of access to decent health care services. Irregular migrants often work in the informal market and are not protected by formal social protection systems. Finally, informal workers, 2 who are typically excluded from traditional poverty-targeted social protection programmes and government databases, become especially vulnerable in times of crisis, as they require both new identification mechanisms and adjustments to existing social protection programmes to be protected (Alfers 2020).

The strength of social protection systems in MENA and their ability to respond to shocks vary tremendously from one country to the next, with some countries suffering from limited financing, inadequate coverage and a lack of coordination and digitised infrastructure (IBC-SP 2020). Nevertheless, the main challenges of low coverage and limited existence of single registries cut across most countries in the region. Generally, there was a low level of social protection coverage prior to the pandemic and considerable gaps in the social policy infrastructure of MENA countries to properly address the needs of the most vulnerable groups, particularly refugees, internally displaced persons, irregular migrants and female foreign workers (IBC-SP 2020). Furthermore, as only a few countries in the region developed single registries in the past decade (Machado et al. 2018), their use in identifying beneficiaries during the COVID response was lower in the MENA region than in all other regions in the global South (Hammad et al. 2021).

Source: UN Children’s Fund