About the Project

We are an independent consortium of think tanks and media outlets contributing the best of our knowledge, expertise and capacities, and working collaboratively with like-minded experts, institutions and actors to turn the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed, to a great extent, inequalities and the lack of access to basic services in the Arab region, into an opportunity to suggest long-term reforms in the Arab social protection systems. Guided by principles of human rights, social justice, citizenship, civic engagement, democratic accountability, and inclusive and sustainable development, we aim to thoroughly map, document and analyze the responses to the pandemic, better understand their impact on social justice, and devise solutions for more efficient, inclusive and sustainable social protection systems. By doing so, we hope to contribute to rethinking the prevailing social contracts. We work towards our aim through research, which seeks to produce knowledge from the ground based on well- established and ethical research methods, to provide a deep and comprehensive assessment of vulnerabilities and how programs and policies (or lack therefore) exacerbate these vulnerabilities and – by extension – poverty, as well as of the cross-cutting gender dimension to this issue, and to suggest the needed pragmatic reforms and convey them to the decision- making level through the available advocacy and lobbying channels.

We envision effective and inclusive social protection systems in the Arab region which foster redistribution, instead of merely resource mobilization, and reduce multidimensional inequality within countries, through the implementation of socio-economic policies and programs that are mindful of the importance of social justice, gender responsiveness, and the sensitivity to the different forms of vulnerability and marginalization. We are aware of the challenge of achieving our goal in the region while dealing with a highly volatile political and economic landscape.

We aim, in two-year time, to upscale our work from the four target/pilot countries to cover more Arab countries, which allows us to account for all priority areas in the region and generate generalizable knowledge and solutions despite the challenge of fluctuating contexts. Our comparative approach also falls under our vision for a new Arab regional order where cooperation and integration are key.

We understand social protection as a continuous pattern of programs and especially policies for longer term social justice, poverty and vulnerability reduction, as well as sustainable development, which makes the concept embedded in all socio-economic public policies. As such, we attempt to bridge the dire need for immediate response with long-term and sustainable priorities.