Consultant: Multidimensional Poverty and Social Protection Background Paper

About the role

The Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) is recruiting a consultant to prepare a background paper on how the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) can complement, rather than replace, PMT-based social protection identification systems and social registries in the Arab region. The paper will be co-authored and substantively led by ESCWA's Poverty and Social Protection Team Leaders and will cover eligibility, geographic prioritization, referral and case management, and monitoring. Work location is Beirut or remote; expected duration is 3 months.

Key responsibilities

• Review the literature on conventional social protection programming (PMT-based approaches, social registries, service delivery) and emerging MPI-informed programming, including recent work by OPHI.
• Review country experiences with PMT, MPI and other household selection approaches, with attention to Latin America, South-East Asia and the Arab region.
• Map the population coverage of social registries in Arab middle-income countries and identify which MPI-related data (especially health and education) are collected during registration.
• Develop a typology of policy applications (geographic and household targeting, cash and cash-plus interventions, case management, shock-responsive protection, impact monitoring) and assess their suitability in different contexts, including low-income and conflict-affected countries.
• Contribute to a consultative meeting with ESCWA teams that produces a proposed framework for integrating PMT-based systems with MPI-informed approaches.
• Address all comments from the Poverty Project and Social Protection Team leaders and deliver all statistical software code, data sets and bibliographic references by the end of the assignment.

All deliverables become the property of ESCWA, and the paper will inform future capacity-building and training activities with member States.