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	The Social Protection Floor Initiative by International Labor Organization & agencies   The UN Social Protection Floor (SPF) Initiative promotes universal access to essential social transfers and services. More then 75% of the global population do not enjoy a set of social guarantees that allow them to deal with life''s risks. Ensuring a social protection floor for these people, struggling just to survive, is a priority.   There is strong evidence that social protection contributes to economic growth by raising labour productivity and enhancing social stability. Investing in a Social Protection Floor is investing in social justice and economic development. Ensuring a SPF for the entire world population represents a considerable challenge, but calculations by various UN agencies show that a basic floor of social transfers is globally affordable at virtually any stage of economic development, even if the funding is not yet available everywhere.   The current financial and economic crisis is having dramatic social, health, hunger and education effects unless decisive action is taken. In times of crisis, transfer incomes, notably social assistance and social security benefits paid to unemployed workers and other vulnerable recipients, act as social and economic stabilizers. Benefits and guaranteed access to services not only prevent people from falling further into poverty but also limit the contraction of aggregate demand thereby curtailing the potential depth of the recession.   And yet, still 75-80% of the global population do not enjoy a set of social guarantees that allow them to deal with life''s risks... . So there is a need for a social protection floor below which nobody should fall. The international community has to support the development of a social protection floor to protect people during the crisis and thereafter.   The Social Protection Floor Initiative is a UN system-wide effort to promote common priorities and solutions, to ensure basic social guarantees for all, says Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General.   The Social Protection Floor is a global social policy approach promoting integrated strategies for providing access to essential social services and income security for all.   Recognizing the importance of ensuring social protection for all, the United Nations System adopted, in April 2009, the Social Protection Floor initiative, as one of the nine UN joint initiatives to cope with the effects of the economic crisis. This initiative is co-led by the International Labour Office and the World Health Organization and involves a group of 17 collaborating agencies, including United Nations agencies and international financial institutions.   The Social Protection Floor approach promotes access to essential social security transfers and social services in the areas of health, water and sanitation, education, food, housing, life and asset-savings information.   It emphasizes the need to implement comprehensive, coherent and coordinated social protection and employment policies to guarantee services and social transfers across the life cycle, paying particular attention to the vulnerable groups.   It is a core part of the Global Jobs Pact and combines income security for the elderly, persons with disabilities and child benefits with public employment guarantee schemes for the unemployed and working poor.   It functions as a tool to protect and empower the vulnerable population to work out of the poverty and find decent jobs.   Beyond the crisis, the social protection floor has gained widespread acceptance as a pivotal component of the sustainable and resilient growth strategy, as a tool to accelerate the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and promote Social Justice.   * You can access the Social Protection Floor website via the link below. Visit the related web page
	Sierra Leone sees Opportunity to Rise Up by IPS - TerraViva   Jan 2010   Sierra Leone sees Opportunity to Rise Up, by Mohamed Fofanah.   The World Social Forum held in Nairobi in 2007 inspired Sierra Leonean activists to organise themselves to demand things like housing, health care and greater accountability from their government. That inspiration was not sustained.   “After we came back from Kenya we had a big five-day meeting in Sierra Leone’s second city, Bo,” says Abu Brima, executive director of a non-governmental organisation called the National Movement for Justice and Development.   “It was attended by many civil society organisations and we discussed issues like corruption and how to get government accountable to the people, how to get government to provide housing and health care facilities, and how to consolidate the peace the country was enjoying after emerging from a civil conflict.”   Brima says the outcome of the forum was the development of a framework for all civil society to use in developing their organisations’ programmes and proposals. Also developed was an agenda for political parties to commit themselves to as they campaigned for the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections. “That social movement was not sustained,” he added.   But social movements did notch up several successes. In December 2007, people in the mining district of Kono demonstrated against the generous concessions made to mining companies, while government’s monitoring and regulation of their activities was poor or non-existent. This led to a new Mining Act that – at least on paper – corrects many of these flaws.   Brima noted that youth successfully challenged the government in 2009 to set up a Youth Commission as recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report of 2004.   “These are significant gains scored by these movements, but as soon as these movements stand on their feet they fall again,” he sighed.   Brima Abdulai Sheriff, director of Amnesty International in Sierra Leone, suggests that part of the problem is that many civil society activists are driven by the financial opportunities rather than the passion for change. Sherrif believes activists too often tailor their campaigns to meet the needs of donors rather than the needs of the people. Then when the funding dries up the campaign dies with it.   Sheriff said other activists lead social movements only to use that platform to seek political office.   He says the various social forums have been crucial to broadening his own organisation’s focus to ensuring that people can participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression, to socio-economic rights like the rights to food, housing and health.   Sheriff pointed out that Amnesty is today campaigning against maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, which has one of the worst rates of maternal death in the world.   “However, apart from big international organisations benefiting from the WSF, grassroots social movements in Sierra Leone hardly participate in these forums.” Sheriff stated.   The World Social Forum will this year hold a series of thematic events around the world. The Africa events planned so far will consider labour and migration, food security and poverty, the global financial crisis.   These events, and the global forum planned for Dakar, Senegal in 2011, offer an opportunity to Sierra Leone’s social movements to meet others facing similar challenges to exchange ideas and strategies.   Sonnia Kabba, a human rights officer working for the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, highlights several areas for fruitful conversation and collaboration, including a concrete agreement on climate change and cancellation of debt.   Kabba advised: “Sierra Leone should consider the fact that compared to other countries of the world, we are hardest hit by all the social and economic problems that are in fact pinning the country to the last rung in the Human Development Index.”   She said she hopes that civil society in Sierra Leone will rise up in a sustained and organised manner as social movements elsewhere in the world have done to fight for their rights and for development.   Brima echoes this sentiment. “The WSF is an opportune place where people come from all over the world and present alternative governance ideas, alternative economic models, and also fosters a sense of solidarity. We all express a desire to transform society. We have opportunities to link with others learn skills like advocacy. Overall there is a sense of inspiration.”   Jan 2010   Reconciling Social and Environmental Needs, by Mario Osava. (Brazil)   One of the greatest challenges facing the world today is to attend to the urgent social needs of the planet’s population, and particularly the one billion people living "on the brink of survival", while dealing with the equally urgent demands of the environment.   This warning came from Brazilian Social Development Minister Patrus Ananias at the Thematic World Social Forum meeting held here in the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia.   Meeting the basic needs of the one billion human beings suffering from hunger today will require the production of more food and other goods, which will inevitably affect the environment, he noted.   As potential means of overcoming the apparent contradiction between food production and protection of the environment, Ananias stressed the solidarity economy, family farming, the creation of cooperatives and "above all, reducing consumption."   Another apparent contradiction, though one that is totally false according to Ananias, is "between economic growth and social inclusion."   Brazil’s experience has demonstrated that social policies such as the family allowances provided to 11 million extremely poor households in exchange for meeting basic requirements (school enrolment for children, for instance) and pensions for people with disabilities actually helped the country to weather the effects of the international financial crisis.   The redistribution of income and social safety net that lifted millions of families out of poverty and turned them into consumers contributed to economic recovery through a "virtuous circle" of economic growth and social justice, he explained.   "We are eradicating hunger," said Ananias, adding that, according to a recent study, if the country’s current policies are maintained, poverty in Brazil will be reduced to the level of a developed nation by 2016.   At the same, however, the high rate of violence in Brazil, resulting in the premature death of tens of thousands of young people every year, casts a pall over the country’s economic and social advances. For this reason, Ananias called on the social activists participating in the meeting to join in a "pact for life" and do their part to combat the causes of this violence.   For his part, Bernard Cassen, one of the founders of the WSF in 2001, said what is really needed in the world today is "to produce locally, strengthen food sovereignty, and ‘relocalise’ the economy."   Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, another panelist, highlighted the fact that the Lula administration adopted a strategy similar to the WSF by organising over 60 national conferences at which the Brazilian public and civil society groups were able to freely voice their views and help shape state policies.   In a message to the participants, Lula praised the World Social Forum as a process that generates "transformational power and energies" and is much more than merely a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of the international business and banking elite held at the same time of year in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.   Meanwhile, João Paulo Rodrigues, one of the coordinators of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), stressed the need to continue to struggle for faster agrarian reform, in order to foster sustainable agriculture and generate employment for young people in rural areas.   Brazil is one of the countries with the highest concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small few, with a great many unproductive large landholdings, he emphasised. Also on the panel were trade union leaders like Artur Henrique, president of the trade union federation Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded in 1983 with the participation of Lula, a union leader himself at the time.   Henrique stressed the key role of employment in the development model to be pursued, and particularly the importance of decent conditions for workers, with an end to employment practices akin to slave labour and the highly precarious nature of work in the informal sector.   An analysis of changes at the international level was presented by United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Carlos Lopes, who is also the head of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). Lopes highlighted the "end of the unipolar world," reflected by the changes that have taken place over the last decade - coinciding with the existence of the WSF - such as China’s accumulation of 2.7 billion dollars in reserves and subsidisation of consumption in the United States.   The rise of the Group of 20 (G20, made up of the finance ministers and central bank governors of world’s leading economies) as a forum for discussing the fate of the world is another result of these changes, although it arose as a "palliative" for global imbalances, he noted.   New forms of international negotiation have gained hold in areas like trade and climate change, and decisions can no longer be adopted without the input of poor countries, such as those of Africa, he said.   But "the new world is not here yet," and inequalities persist, said Lopes. Moreover, the crises that the world currently faces are "multifaceted" and it is impossible to even adequately gauge their true scale. 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