Recently, researchers and advocates working to promote the adoption of social protection policies in southern Africa got together and asked: Has social protection in sub-Saharan Africa lost its way? Their discussions resulted in a thought-provoking document, available here, which explores this question.

A number of donors and organisations are currently working together to try to persuade governments in southern Africa to adopt social protection programmes aimed at assisting the most vulnerable members of our society. In particular, these organisations would like to see child-sensitive social protection policies being adopted.

As social cash transfers grow in popularity relative to other kinds of social transfers (such as food aid), there’s now an effort to investigate innovative ways of delivering cash to recipients effectively and efficiently. A number of public (government to person) cash transfer projects and programmes have experimented with the use of electronic delivery systems and a new paper in RHVP's Frontiers of Social Protection series examines some of these.

An excellent set of entries was submitted from Malawi for our competition, following the training organised by FrayIntermedia and sponsored by the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP). The standard was high and it was tough trying to decide on a winner but after much deliberation, Michael Kaiyatsa was awarded the prize for his article, Cash Transfers Giving Hope to Vulnerable Women, published in the Sunday Times of January 31st, 2010.

Training workshops in Reporting on Poverty, Food Security and Social Protection have been held in Zambia, Tanzania, Botswana and Malawi. The workshops were organised by FrayIntermedia, and sponsored by the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP), with funding from UKAid.

FrayIntermedia and RHVP offered a prize for the best article or broadcast report produced and published within one month of each workshop. So far, prizes have been awarded for Zambia and Tanzania.

In October the issue of hunger usually receives a lot of attention, since World Food Day falls on October 16th. This year was no exception and there were many media reports highlighting the fact that over 1 billion people are going hungry in 2009, as result of an ongoing food crisis, as well as the global economic crunch.

But while there’s always a lot of fanfare around World Food Day, if we are to begin reducing hunger, the challenge is to ensure that the issue gets attention all year round. The challenge then is for journalists to continue to ask questions, to find interesting stories, and innovative ways of covering hunger, poverty and vulnerability.

As African countries look into various forms of social protection, one of the key debates revolves around the issue of targeting – who should benefit from cash transfers or other forms of support? A debate has arisen between two positions – those who believe in poverty targeting and those who favour categorical targeting.

Poverty targeting means that programmes should attempt to identify the poorest and most deprived members of society, and provide benefits only to them.

Categorical targeting, on the other hand, means that benefits go to people who fall into a specific category that is closely associated with poverty – such as old age pensioners, or children under a certain age.

The question of which form of targeting is better, is one of the biggest dilemmas facing policy makers who are thinking about implementing large-scale, countrywide social protection programmes.