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The objective of the Social Security Department is the enhanced capacity of constituents, and particularly social security managers, to design sustainable social security schemes, and to manage and administer them more efficiently, with a view to the provision of better benefits and the extension of their coverage. This is achieved through the development of a framework for the design and planning of social security schemes and programmes, including their reform and extension to the informal sector, based on comparative analysis and an assessment of national experience in this field. The Global Campaign on Social Security and Coverage for All which was launched in 2003 to encourage the extension of social security coverage as a means for combating poverty and social exclusion following the conclusions and recommendations of the 2001 International Labour Conference provides the platform for attaining this objective.
Advice and guidance, underpinned by the relevant international labour standards and comparative research and analysis, is provided through technical advisory services to governments. The Social Security Department provides support in the design and implementation of national social security legislation in conformity with international labour standards.
The Social Security Department through its International Financial and Actuarial Service assists government agencies and autonomous social protection organisms to develop their own capacity for quantitative planning to improve the management and governance of their social security schemes. This includes actuarial reviews of national pension benefits, health care benefits, short-term benefits and unemployment benefits as well as comprehensive financial, fiscal and economic analyses of social security reform proposals and analysis of national social budgets.
Furthermore the Social Security Department through its policy development and applied research provides its contributions to global debates on a variety of topical social security issues such as recently on international migration, the impacts of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, poverty alleviation through universal basic social protection benefits. In this line analysis is being done into the financial feasibility and sustainability of providing universal non-contributory basic pensions in six low income sub Sahara African countries as a vehicle for extension of social protection to the hitherto excluded and as a powerful tool for poverty alleviation and as a means of attaining the Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction.
The Social Security Department is also a very active contributor to the development and the dissemination of training of Social Security Managers. Since 2001 the dissemination of methodologies for good governance has been one of the main foci of operations which the Department has piloted through the Masters programmes in partnership with the University of Maastricht (Netherlands) and the University of Lausanne and other training activities. Through the development of its recent internet training platform CIARIS, the Department supports organizations and individuals in the conception, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of projects aimed at fighting social exclusion at the local level.
Furthermore, the Social Security Department has been and is the source of knowledge base on social protection at the international level through the publication of its series on the Cost of Social Security until 1996. Presently it is producing a universally accessible international database of statistics and indicators that describe social conditions, social protection deficits, and national social protection systems. The database should be available later on this year and will be a valuable tool for specialists in social protection for national and international policy formulation and research.
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