On the 24th of June 2022 Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, presented his report on Non-take-up of rights in the context of social protection [1]in the UN Human Rights Council’s 50th Session. The report finds that millions of people, including some of the world’s most marginalized groups, are unable to benefit from the very systems that have been set up to protect them.
Individuals are falling through the cracks of social protection schemes
The report details the phenomenon of ‘non-take-up’, whereby people cannot claim their much-needed benefits such as income support or housing allowance, which can be for getting and keeping people in adequate housing. At the individual and household levels, non-take-up results in more hardship for those already experiencing financial difficulties. In regions where figures do exist however, rates of non-take-up appear exceedingly high: over 40% for most of the benefits considered across the EU. However, the estimates of non-take-up remain limited since there is lack of adequate data.
Exclusion from social registries
Individuals can be excluded from social protection for a variety of reasons, but two particularly prevalent obstacles are targeting and exclusion errors in social registries and lack of citizenship and problems with birth registration which prevent many groups from benefiting from social protection.
Social registries are a common tool used to identify and record households eligible for social protection in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the Global South. These registries involve enumerators visiting households, collecting data and determining, on the basis of specific indicators, whether or not they are eligible for inclusion in the registry. When the enumerators collect data to populate the social registry, they often do not manage to reach all households. For example, households and individuals that are difficult to access because they live in remote areas or in precarious or temporary housing may be left out. That is the paradox of social registries: while meant to facilitate eligibility for social protection schemes, they exclude those who may need the benefits the most. Several crucial problems exist with respect to the effectiveness of social registries in identifying the poorest households and therefore in guaranteeing their right to social security.
Initial hurdles leading to non-take-up
Houselessness presents specific challenges when it comes to non-take-up the report shows. In Belgium, a system has been put in place to enable persons without fixed addresses to remain eligible for social protection benefits. They can use a reference address with a local public welfare office (centre public d’action sociale) instead of providing a home address. While the number of people with such reference addresses quadrupled between 2006 and 2016, the difficulties involved in obtaining a reference address have also been highlighted.
Read the full report here.
Watch Olivier De Schutter’s presentation to the Human Rights Council at UN Web TV here.
[1] https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G22/322/17/PDF/G2232217.pd...
