A Policy Path to Inclusive Social Protection
Veynuus intends to publish a policy paper setting out options for making social protection in Somalia more inclusive and more resilient to shocks. This page describes the options the paper would examine, the evidence it would draw on, and how it would be reviewed.
What the evidence shows
The policy question
A precise statement of the problem the paper addresses, including which parts of it are contested and by whom.
Options to be examined
A defined set of policy options, each written with its cost, its administrative requirements and its failure modes.
Shock-responsive design
An examination of what it would take for a system to expand during a drought or displacement shock and contract afterwards.
Financing
A section on financing routes, including domestic revenue, pooled donor funding, and zakat-based and Shariah-compliant instruments.
Consultation and review
The consultation process the paper would run before publication, and who would review it.
Policy papers on social protection tend to fail in one of two directions. They recommend what is administratively impossible, or they recommend what is already being done. Veynuus intends to publish a paper that avoids both by writing each option with its cost, its administrative preconditions and the circumstances in which it would not work. The paper has not been written. This page describes what it would contain and how it would be produced.
What this publication covers
The paper is planned to open by stating the policy question precisely: which households a system is intended to reach, on what basis, and who decides. Much of the disagreement in this area is disagreement about that question rather than about the answer, and papers that skip it end up arguing past their readers.
It would then set out a defined set of options. Each would be written to the same structure: what it changes, what it costs, what administrative capacity it assumes, who gains and who is excluded, and how it fails. A separate section would deal with shock-responsive design, which is the question of whether a system can expand during a drought or a displacement shock and contract afterwards without losing its records or its legitimacy. A financing section would examine domestic revenue routes, pooled donor arrangements, and zakat-based and Shariah-compliant instruments, setting out what each would require in governance terms rather than treating any of them as a solved problem.
Each option in the paper is planned to be written to a common structure: what it changes, what it costs, what capacity it assumes, and how it fails.
Method
The paper would draw on published policy documents and programme evaluations for Somalia and for comparable settings, and on the firm's own field research where that research has been completed and can be cited. Comparative material would be treated carefully. A mechanism that worked in a country with a functioning civil registry is not evidence for a country building one, and the paper would say so where it borrows an example.
Consultation would run in parallel with drafting rather than after it. We would put the option set to federal and state officials, to implementing partners, and to organisations representing the households the policy concerns, and record where views diverge. Costings would be built from stated unit assumptions published alongside the paper, so that a reader who disagrees with an assumption can recalculate rather than argue.
Before publication the draft would go through internal review, then to external readers including at least one specialist with no involvement in the drafting. Every recommendation would carry an explicit statement of the evidence behind it and its strength. Where the evidence is thin, the paper would present the option as a proposition to be tested rather than as a recommendation.
Who it is for
The intended readers are policy staff in the federal and state ministries responsible for social affairs and finance, donors and development banks funding social protection, the implementing organisations that would have to operate whatever is decided, and the advocacy and research community working on the question. It is written for readers who have to choose between options rather than agree with a direction.
Status
This paper is in preparation. No options have been assessed, no costings have been produced, and no recommendation has been made or endorsed by any institution. Nothing on this page should be read as policy advice. To register interest, to take part in the consultation, or to discuss commissioning the work, write to [email protected].