A country’s decision to invest in social protection depends on political will, not on financial availability, according to Dr Stephen Devereux, co-director of the Centre for Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies.
Dr Devereux is a development economist working predominantly on food security, famine, rural livelihoods, social protection and poverty reduction issues. In a video-interview to the WFP Centre of Excellence against Hunger, he highlights the importance of the cooperation among Southern nations to attain the necessary political will to promote social protection and achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero hunger.
“What countries are doing in Latin America can also inform what is happening in Africa, and you can learn lessons from there and apply them in Asia or vice-versa”, he says. South-South cooperation helps create evidences that social protection initiatives work and are beneficial to countries. “In the past, a lot of donor countries from Europe would try to persuade countries in Africa, Asia, or Latin America that they should follow what was happening in Europe, but it was not relevant, it was not appropriate to them, so South-South learning is much more appropriate”.