COVID-19: What does it mean for digital social protection?

Silvia Masiero

doi:10.1177/2053951720978995

Abstract

COVID-19 has hit a world in which social protection schemes are increasingly augmented with digital measures. Digital identity schemes are especially being adopted to match citizens’ data with social protection entitlements, enabling authentication through demographic and, increasingly, biometric data at the point of access. In this commentary, I discuss three sets of implications that COVID-19 has yielded on digital social protection, whose central trade-off – increasing the probabilities of accurate user identification, at the cost of greater exclusions – has become even more problematic during the crisis. I argue that three forms of data injustice – legal, informational and design-related, previously identified in datafied social protection schemes, will need to be monitored in the post-pandemic scenario. I finally observe that the crisis exposes the long-term need to place digitality within social protection schemes that expand user entitlements rather than constraining them. Implications of such reflections are drawn for the study of data-based social welfare interventions.

Highlights

Social protection can be seen as ‘the set of policies and programmes aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their lifecycles, the most vulnerable groups’ (FAO, 2018)
In the aftermath of the lockdown announced by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 19 March 2020, numerous informal workers have lost their main source of income, while internal migrants have been stranded from their regions, cities or towns of origin. In this situation of sudden crisis, the importance of extant social protection systems such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) has been brought to the fore, and with it the seriousness of issues related to the exclusion of entitled users
The need for biometric-free social protection systems goes beyond risk of transmission from touchscreen machines, and points to the exclusionary effects perpetuated in the trade-off brought by digital identity

Summary

Introduction

Social protection can be seen as ‘the set of policies and programmes aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their lifecycles, the most vulnerable groups’ (FAO, 2018). Keywords Data justice, social protection, COVID-19, digital identity, anti-poverty programmes, Aadhaar With lockdown measures disproportionately affecting vulnerable groups such as poor, migrant and informal workers (Dreze, 2020), extant social protection schemes have acquired even greater importance for their users, with situations where existing provisions have been increased in volume and coverage to help face the crisis.

Results

Conclusion