This toolkit aims to support policy makers, programme designers, implementers and evaluators to apply a much-needed gender lens to social protection.

The past decade has seen a marked spike in policy momentum around the importance of social protection policies and programmes yet there has been very little attention to social protection’s role in tackling gendered experiences of poverty and vulnerability.

Increasingly, social protection is recognised as a key policy tool to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); as a policy approach underpinned by rigorous evaluation evidence (in middle-income countries); as a critical mechanism to cushion the poor and newly poor from the worst effects of the global recession; and as a core human right. At the same time, the 2000s have seen a renewed interest in the role that addressing gender inequalities can play in achieving broader development objectives, as highlighted by the World Bank’s new mantra ‘Gender Equality Makes Economic Sense’. Surprisingly, however, there has been a profound disconnect between these two agendas.