Paper
Social Security Systems in Low Income Countries: Concepts, Constraints, And The Need For Cooperation
Why it is high time the state hands over responsibility to other social security providers
27 pages
This paper describes existing systems of social security in developing countries and analyses their institutional strengthes and weaknesses. To this end, the paper identifies four main providers of social security:
- The state;
- The market;
- Member-based organisations;
- Private households.
Given the weaknesses of each system, the paper explores the possibilities of a public-private partnership which should be based on local information on the one hand, while profiting from possibilities of risk pooling, reinsurance and better access to risk capital on the other. The paper concludes that:
- A necessary pre-condition for a cooperation between different providers of social security is that the state accepts it must give up some of its activities;
- Policy, technical cooperation and research has too long focused on different aspects of the state based systems as compulsory social insurance schemes;
- It is time to broaden the concept of public-private partnership, to take into account civic organisations engaged in social security provision and formulate and evaluate pilot projects which experiment with different froms of partnerships.
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