Targeting social protection and agricultural interventions: The potential for synergies

- Social protection programmes and agricultural interventions can reinforce each other.
- Working together, both policy areas can make a stronger contribution to food security.
- Coherent targeting mechanisms play a crucial role for the promotion of synergies.
- Geographical targeting may be insufficient to ensure beneficiary overlapping across programmes.
- Single registries and integrated databases are key instruments to boost targeting coherence.

Social protection programmes and agricultural interventions for family farmers tend to operate in isolation from each other. This paper shows how coherent targeting mechanisms can help to coordinate both policy areas and create synergies. We argue that target groups and targeting methods used in both areas are often very similar or potentially complementary, which constitutes a promising basis for better coordination. Moreover, the paper describes relevant cases to illustrate how targeting is already being used to foster synergies between the two areas. We conclude based on these case studies that targeting coordination and overall coherence are indispensable tools to generate positive synergies between social protection and agricultural interventions - a potential basis for addressing food security more effectively in the future.