Paraguay moves toward setting up a National Social Protection System

A “letter of commitment” was signed between the Director of the Social Cabinet of Paraguay and the director of the EUROsociaAL+ Programme, initiating actions to lay the foundations of the country’s National Social Protection System. The support process envisages the following steps:

• National symposiums (7) with representatives from the university and business sectors, civil society, and so on.
• Preparation of a draft Sector-Specific Social Protection Bill (version 2.0) which sets the foundation for the future social protection system, based on an analysis of existing policies and the main challenges and obstacles. The Sector-Specific Bill sets out a series of short-term goals for 2018 which, in general, refer to improvements to the management of existing programmes and extending their coverage. It also defines a series of longer-term goals to be achieved by 2023, which relate to the building of the System itself.
• Peer review of the draft with a group of international experts, processing the contributions of the peer review and final draft of the Sector-specific Social Protection Bill 2.0.
• Public presentation of regional and European institutional models for the implementation of the Social Protection System at an International Seminar and strategic discussion spaces.
• Presentation of the Bill at an international Seminar and submission of the bill to the transition team to the new government which will take over after the April 2018 general elections.

It is important to point out that EUROsociAL (continuing activities conducted in the previous stage of this programme) also has the role of providing the foundations for making the European Union “budget support” for the country’s Social Protection Programme (48 million Euros, according to the Multi-annual Indicative Programme (MIP)).

The signing of the letter of commitment took place in the emotive setting of the 1st General Meeting of the EUROsociAL+ Programme in San José, Costa Rica, and was attended by the representative of the EU Delegation to Paraguay, Paraguayan representatives at the meeting and the coordinator of the social policy area at EUROsociAL.