The ILO provides a wide range of technical advisory services to support policy development, programme design and costing, as well as the implementation and reform of social protection systems. The objective of ILO technical advisory services is twofold:

• they are tailored to unique country circumstances as well as to the capacity of implementing agencies;
• they promote the transfer of skills and knowledge, which cultivates national ownership of proposed solutions, enhances the implementation capacity of personnel and tripartite constituents, and strengthens governance systems and processes.

Technical advisory requests received by the ILO include requests for:

• actuarial valuation and costing of national social protection systems;
• enhancement of statistical capacity to monitor and evaluate existing systems;
• facilitating dialogue with tripartite stakeholders;
• assisting governments to realize sufficient fiscal space to deepen their social security systems. 

The ILO has developed numerous tools and guidelines to assist constituents to prepare data for valuation exercises, to undertake rapid costing exercises using online models, to guide national dialogue debates to set social protection policies, and to enhance the cross-sectoral coordination of social protection programmes so as to ensure a holistic system. The World Social Protection Database and the World Social Protection Report offer ILO constituents the most comprehensive and updated information and statistics available on global social protection systems and trends. Policymakers are therefore able to use these information sources as learning and benchmarking tools.