1.44 billion people still living on less than US$ 1.25 a day

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Chairperson of the Social Protection Floor Advisory Group and Executive Director of UN Women, Mrs Michelle Bachelet, has said that the implementation of social protection floors can offer an effective response to the increasing demands for social justice in many countries, ILO News reports.

Mrs Bachelet – a former President of Chile – warned that despite some progress over the past decades, 1.44 billion people are still living on less than US$ 1.25 a day and close to a third of the world’s population, 1.75 billion, experience multidimensional poverty with deprivations in health, economic opportunities and living standards. At the same time, around 75 per cent of people worldwide do not have access to adequate social security.

“All these indicators represent a social liability that threatens political stability and undermines economic prosperity”, she said before a group of international experts on social protection. “The Floor is a feasible and sustainable solution that very much corresponds with the reality of our time in which some countries are facing increasing social unrest and sluggish economic recovery”.

Mrs Bachelet said the global economic crisis had shown that countries that invested and continued to invest in social spending during the recession had fared better than those that resorted to cuts.

Mrs Bachelet called for social protection floors to be integrated into national development plans, adding that this is not a “one-size-fits-all-solution” but rather a “flexible, integrated and gradualist approach that can be tailored to fit specifics circumstances and current institutional and financial capacities”.

She also said the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, regional development banks as well as the donor community have a fundamental role to play in taking the Social Protection Floor initiative forward.