Mongolia’s Joint Programme (JP) for Integrated Social Protection focuses on extending social protection to herders and their families, and enhancing the system’s shock-responsiveness to minimize their vulnerability to extreme climate change and poverty. The JP aims to combine its investment in social protection system development with an intervention to prevent herders and their families from sliding into a poverty trap.

The JP has achieved significant progress over the first six months. A shock-responsive social protection tool (“Child Money Programme”) has been piloted in Zavkhan Province to minimize herders’ risks to shocks, and make social protection more accessible to them during the current pandemic. The Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis Tool (RIMA-II) has been introduced to analyze herder household resilience capacity to climate-related risks such as dzud and other shocks. Data has been collected from 2240 herder households in soums across Zavkhan and Khuvsgul provinces to analyze their capacity for introducing a resilience strategy to their groups and local communities.

Herders’ entrepreneurial and business skills have been strengthened through new technology,

equipment and advanced knowledge of livestock production, which may lead to increased income and participation in social and health protection schemes. Technical assistance has been provided to the Government on shock-responsive social protection policy implementation and monitoring. The team has also supported the decentralization of social protection infrastructure and designed capacity-building training programmes for Social Insurance General Office staff in order to promote effective social insurance coverage of herders. Thus, over the first six months, the Mongolia JP has made significant headway toward extending shock-responsive social protection to herder communities.