Briefing note: Assessing the role of social protection to address the crisis in the Gaza Strip and West Bank – FAO

01 September 2024

Recommended Actions:

Social protection interventions and a humanitarian cash response aligned to the national social protection system are urgently required to preserve access to food and other basic needs, ensure minimum income and protect all livelihoods in the West Bank. Similar interventions will be required to restore access to food and basic needs and contribute to the rehabilitation of all basic systems, including agrifood, in the Gaza Strip once a ceasefire is in place. Given the dire situation in the Gaza Strip, leveraging the MoSD social protection system to provide emergency support at this stage is no longer a viable option due to collapsing markets and escalating inflation.

In case of a ceasefire, short- and medium-term social protection responses to the crisis in the Gaza Strip could include the following:

• Cash for work, cash for assets and other productive safety net interventions (cash+) could be designed and implemented to restore basic services and infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads, lands, water and irrigation systems and other assets destroyed during the current conflict. Such interventions could facilitate the rehabilitation of the overall agrifood systems by supporting local actors along specific value chains.
• Once markets are again at least partially functioning, multipurpose humanitarian cash interventions will be necessary to ensure access to basic needs, including food, health care, and housing. Targeted beneficiaries would be mainly internally displaced persons, persons with disabilities, orphans, women, and youth. Necessary coordination with other sectors, such as health and education, will be required for optimizing the impacts of the interventions on the ground.
• Humanitarian cash interventions will be used to restore the social protection system in the Gaza Strip as they will contribute to rebuilding the social registry and the delivery mechanisms of the PNCTP and other relevant social protection interventions in the territory. Rebuilding a social protection system in the Gaza Strip will be essential in the medium term to rebuild the social contract between the PA and its citizens.

Short- and medium-term responses in the West Bank could include the following:

• Advocate for increased financing of the PNCTP in the West Bank to cover additional basic needs resulting from the Israeli ban on Palestinian workers and settler violence in the West Bank.
• Improve the adequacy and the responsiveness of the PNCTP for anticipating potential future shocks on livelihoods and for ensuring access to minimum income and basic needs, including food, health, and education.
• Ensure a greater alignment between humanitarian cash interventions and the PNCTP through the use of coordination mechanisms, such as the SPCVA TWG, to ensure the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the support to affected Palestinian populations.
• Preserve and promote the agricultural livelihoods of vulnerable populations in the West Bank, which are highly vulnerable to land expropriation and conflict-related violence. This includes complementing existing social safety interventions with conditional cash transfers and agricultural support to increase the incomes of families engaged or willing to engage in agriculture.

Long-term responses in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank could include the following:

• Continue bolstering the resilience and sustainability of the PA social protection system to withstand financial crises and shocks while also ensuring effective coordination with development and humanitarian actors, through the SPCVA TWG. Efforts are needed to further align humanitarian and development initiatives towards the streamlining of the flagship PNCTP to improve its impact, cost-effectiveness, operational efficiency, and responsiveness.
• Improve the national social protection system’s ability to respond effectively to shocks by enhancing its capacity, including financial, for both vertical and horizontal responses during crises. This will include establishing protocols for accessing contingency financing and sustainable financing mechanisms for social protection, utilizing resources from both domestic and international sources. Similarly, the dialogue should be continued between the MoSD and other key stakeholders, like the Ministry of Agriculture, the PNEEI, and the UNRWA to address the fragmentation of programming, particularly in the humanitarian-development-peace nexus and within the agriculture sector.
• Institutionalize streamlined methods for targeting and selecting beneficiaries to prevent errors and duplications. Efforts are needed to improve the systematic crosschecking of multipurpose cash-assistance beneficiary lists with social protection records to avoid duplication of beneficiaries. This can be achieved by utilizing the newly developed national social registry, with development and humanitarian actors routinely providing information back to the MoSD on those covered. Efforts also should be heightened to reduce exclusion errors through the adoption of the proxy means test formula and additional indicators that encompass broader definitions of poverty or other criteria, including those associated with food security and nutrition. Similarly, there is a need to progressively include the increasing number of persons with disabilities in the Gaza Strip within the national social registry. In addition, a dedicated sub-registry for vulnerable and poor farmers should be established to provide adequate life-saving and life-sustaining support.
• Strengthen economic inclusion and poverty exit strategies and programmes to be associated with the PNCTP. In the long term, efforts should be made to continue linking PNCTP with a broader range of active labour-market and livelihood interventions, including reconstruction public works, to promote economic inclusion and poverty exit/graduation and to ensure the financial sustainability of PNCTP through the PNEEI.
• Establish a social insurance and lifecycle system for private-sector workers. Over time, connections between non-contributory and contributory social protection systems should be established by leveraging a more diversified funding base, including general tax revenues and social contributions for social insurance.

Within this framework, FAO has a specific niche in enhancing the social protection system and its coherence with the agriculture sector for eliminating chronic hunger, malnutrition and rural poverty. FAO is fully committed to in its endeavours to protect and revitalize agrifood systems and agriculture-based livelihoods for the Palestinian people. This commitment entails integrating social protection with sustainable agricultural interventions to foster solutions for enhanced economic inclusion, resilience and food and nutrition security. This is pursued through specific pathways.

• In the immediate term, FAO is completing the distribution of 500 tonnes of fodder purchased in Cairo for about 2 900 beneficiaries. This is the first time much-needed animal fodder has entered the Gaza Strip since the escalation of hostilities. The procurement of other inputs, including fodder (5,500 tonnes), water tanks, animal shelters, veterinary kits, vaccines, greenhouse materials, seeds and fertilizers, is ongoing. In the West Bank, FAO will protect the resilience of vulnerable farmers and herders affected by increased violence and movement restrictions by providing emergency assistance through unconditional and conditional cash transfers and additional agricultural support.
• In the medium and long term, FAO will work in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with partners, including ILO, UNICEF, WFP, World Bank, UNRWA and Oxfam to:
  • improve coordination between the MoSD, humanitarian actors and other key stakeholders such as the Ministry of Agriculture and the PNEEI to address the fragmentation of social protection and development and humanitarian assistance programming within the agricultural context and
  • establish a dedicated sub registry for vulnerable and poor farmers to provide adequate life-saving and life-saving and life-sustaining support.

In the medium and long term, FAO stands ready to implement productive safety net interventions to improve food security and nutrition and provide minimum income to Palestinians engaged in agrifood systems. This entails facilitating access to basic needs for food-insecure households working in farming, herding and fishing through unconditional cash transfers. It also involves delivering conditional cash transfers to vulnerable farmers, herders and fishers to ensure their access to agricultural inputs. Such measures will also contribute to revamping the production of nutritious foods, including fresh vegetables, eggs, meat and dairy, and to reconstructing vital food value chains such as that for olives. These interventions will also aim at providing a response to the loss of and damage to agricultural infrastructures caused by the ongoing conflict while stimulating the local economy during the recovery phase