Conflict Disruptions to Social Assistance in a Multi-Hazard Context: Assessing Responses to the Northern Ethiopia Crisis (2020–22)

This paper focuses on both the responsiveness and resilience of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) to large-scale conflict shocks. Focusing on how PSNP systems and implementation responded during the 2020–22 conflict in northern Ethiopia, the paper considers the possible scope of the programme’s design and delivery structures to address vulnerabilities related to future large-scale conflict shocks. The crisis illustrated just how critical it is that social protection for chronically vulnerable households and humanitarian support for people in acute need complement each other to ensure broad and effective coverage. The PSNP did not and could not scale up to meet additional needs created by conflict. Instead, humanitarian aid covered some proportion of these needs, particularly for those who were not already programme beneficiaries, as well as for PSNP clients who were displaced and could not be reached through PSNP channels. Still, the provision from the different sectors progressed in a stop-start, reactive, and piecemeal way, with limited strategic coordination. The PSNP’s success in delivering timely, predictable, and adequate transfers requires ways of strengthening the programme’s effectiveness. This would encompass measures to ensure that the programme avoids causing further unintentional harm; maintains the systems and structures to ensure that basic programme functions continue; and mobilises an adequate response to the additional needs generated by conflict, including through improved coordination with humanitarian channels.