The Basic Social Protection Services That Should Be Afforded to All Belizeans

The Ministry of Human Development in Partnership with UNICEF and civil society stakeholders are working to establish a Social Protection Floor (SPF) in Belize.  A social protection floor is a basic set of social rights, services and facilities that every person should enjoy.  The Ministry of Human Development and UNICEF hosted a three-day event in Belize City, under the theme, “Protection for All Belizeans”. The event was created to strengthen Belize’s social protection system through the implementation of a Social Protection Floor integrated into a national Social Protection Strategy. We heard from Alison Parker, the Country Representative from UNICEF Belize.

Alison Parker

Alison Parker, Country Representative, UNICEF Belize

“So having defined poverty for Belize, where do we go from there? How do we identify the people? And that’s what this three days conversation has been. Who are the poor, where are they and how can we reach them? What have we been doing? So what could we do better and what could we do differently? And it’s been amazing that for the first time we see all the players coming together. It’s the government is the international organizations. It’s the private sector, it’s the civil society organizations, everybody coming together and having one conversation in one room. So that’s all our different interventions and um, our thoughts and the interventions we are making can come into one. And so today is crystallization of that where the thoughts and the conversations over the last two days, we are now brought for validation. And you can see the endorsement is coming from the CEOs to say, yes, we believe this is the way to go, and there’s that commitment to move it to the next step. I think there are three key steps are going to happen next. Of course, we are going to take the pieces of this and crystallize them, but already we are going to be defining then what is a protect social protection floor for Belize. What is that minimum? That has to go to whomever in order to keep them afloat in a period of crisis or in a difficult situation. So that’s one level that we are going to define. We are also going to have to look at targeting, who are these people and how do we do that monitoring and evaluation framework to make sure that we can target them very well. And out of that will be developing a social protection strategy for the country.”

Dolores Balderamos Garcia

Dolores Balderamos Garcia, Minister of Human Development

“Apparently we even had about seventy partners yesterday, including private sector, civil society, government, government agencies, and statutory bodies like for example, the National Commission for Families and Children. And we have had a good, solid discussion. What is coming out of it, the takeaway, if we could call it that,  What is coming out of it is that we have to do more coordination and we have to build our partnerships because while we aren’t doing too badly in terms of shock responsiveness, like say for Hurricane Lisa,  there is so much more to do.”