Systems thinking meets human thinking

The ILO’s World Social Protection Report 2024-26 highlights the progress made by lower-middle-income countries in expanding social protection coverage, while emphasizing that significant gaps remain globally. To accelerate progress, it calls for extension strategies that address legal, financial, administrative and information barriers, particularly for workers in small enterprises, self-employed workers, refugees and women, while investing in awareness-raising, outreach and strengthening compliance.

These are also central to Jordan's efforts to extend social security coverage. While efforts have traditionally focused on the latter, the ILO’s Estidama++ initiative focussed on employer engagement. It asked a simple question: how can businesses be supported and incentivised to contribute to social security over the long term? Applying the market systems development (MSD) approach, it examined structural, behavioural and operational barriers that shape employers’ decisions to register and retain workers in the social security system.

Established through a partnership between the ILO and Jordan’s Social Security Corporation (SSC), Estidama++ is designed in alignment with International Labour Standards, as part of a national strategy for extending the coverage of the national social security scheme to vulnerable populations. It combined enterprise productivity support to improve firms’ ability to contribute, identified and reinforced incentives for continued participation, strengthened SSC’s capacity to respond to employers’ needs and realities, and introduced a short-term subsidy to enable businesses to register more workers.