Do social protection programs in South Asia have the potential to be nutrition-sensitive? Insights from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan

Social protection programs (SPPs) are designed to help individuals and households cope with chronic poverty, destitution, and vulnerability. In the context of food systems, SPPs can help tackle the challenge of affordability of healthy diets. Nutrition-sensitive SPPs include conditions or additional interventions that enhance impacts on nutrition. This research note organizes SPPs in South Asia using an existing framework, describes their characteristics (scale, entitled benefits, and eligibility) and provides examples of features that can be added to SPPs to make them more nutrition-sensitive.