In modern social policy, poverty is measured not only by those already living in it, but by those at risk of falling into it - and by a state's capacity to catch a family before a passing crisis hardens into chronic vulnerability and, eventually, into a poverty trap that is difficult to escape.
اضافة اعلان
It is in this context that Jordan's National Social Protection Strategy 2025-2033 acquires its significance. The strategy does not simply propose redistributing subsidies or extending beneficiary lists. It seeks to rebuild the concept of protection itself: by connecting cash assistance to social services, linking empowerment to the labour market, expanding the social insurance umbrella, and creating tools for early response to economic shocks.
The ambition, in other words, goes beyond the state's ability to deliver aid on time. The goal is to prevent poverty before it occurs, shorten the time families spend in it, and stop them from slipping back after they have escaped.
The strategy rests on four pillars: 'Karama' (Dignity) for social assistance; 'Tamkeen' (Empowerment) for social services; 'Fursa' (Opportunity) for employment and social insurance; and 'Sumoud' (Resilience) for shock response. The real value of this structure, however, lies not in dividing responsibilities between institutions, but in the system's ability to function as a single, coherent whole that moves around the family and its needs - rather than around separate institutional programmes.
Jordan already operates an extensive social support network. Some 249,000 families currently receive monthly recurring cash support, encompassing 1.121 million individuals, at an estimated annual cost of around 259 million dinars. Yet the breadth of that network does not automatically mean that poverty risk is declining.
Rising beneficiary numbers may indicate that the state is better at reaching those in need, but they may equally reflect a widening circle of economic fragility. The question shifts, then, from the scale of protection to its effect. The state needs to know not just who requires support, but why they require it, what could end that need, what intervention is appropriate when a family is able to work, and what can be offered when it is not.
If cash support provides a minimum floor of security, the harder challenge begins with the question: what comes after the support? The executive programme of the National Aid Fund targets an increase in the share of beneficiaries aged 18 to 45 referred to the National Employment Programme, from 7 percent to 15 percent by 2028. It also targets a cumulative total of 5,000 beneficiaries referred to vocational training, and an increase in the share of families receiving supplementary services alongside cash support, from 25 percent to 35 percent.
These targets matter, but they measure a beneficiary's movement through the system rather than whether the system has actually changed that person's economic situation. A referral to training is not a job. A referral to an employment programme is not necessarily stable work. And work itself does not become a shield against poverty unless it provides sustainable income and decent conditions.
The real test of empowerment therefore begins after employment: Did the person stay in the job? Did the family's income improve? Did its dependence on support fall? Did it return to the programme after a period?
The evaluation framework must shift accordingly - from counting referrals to tracking a family's trajectory after referral. That is the difference between an employment policy that absorbs numbers and an empowerment policy that changes economic reality.
At the heart of this transformation sits the social registry, through which the government aims to unify access to social protection services and reach 12 services by 2028. But the process cannot stop at digitising assistance applications. The real value begins when the state moves from treating each benefit as a separate file to reading the family as a single unit of needs and risks.
A family with a disabled child, a sick parent, or a woman who cannot work because of care responsibilities does not necessarily need only additional cash support. It may need a health or social intervention, a care service, training, or employment. In that context, the registry can become the system's decision-making intelligence - identifying needs, matching them to services, and tracking outcomes.
That ambition requires more than a digital platform. It requires up-to-date data, effective information-sharing between institutions, unified standards, data governance, and privacy protection. The registry succeeds not when paperwork disappears, but when the state's decision about a family actually changes.
Economic empowerment cannot be reduced to training and employment alone. Some barriers to work lie outside the labour market itself. Unpaid care for children, elderly relatives, or people with disabilities can prevent family members - particularly women - from entering or remaining in the workforce. In this light, childcare, care services, and early-intervention programmes matter beyond their immediate social function: they are infrastructure for economic participation.
While cash support addresses one dimension of existing poverty, social insurance addresses one of its most important potential sources. A worker who loses employment or earning capacity, or reaches old age without adequate insurance income, can quickly see an individual problem become a household income crisis. Extending insurance coverage to new, flexible, and part-time forms of work is therefore an element of poverty prevention, not simply a reform of the insurance system. The strategy places this expansion under the 'Opportunity' pillar, linking work to insurance protection and limiting the risk of a family falling into dependency when it loses its income source. Yet wider coverage brings an equation the state cannot ignore: expanding the insured population while keeping the insurance system financially sustainable. Protection that cannot be sustained financially provides no long-term security.
The strategy introduces shock response as a core element of the protection system - an attempt to treat crises not as emergencies but as risks that can be anticipated and prepared for. It provides for developing an early social-warning system linked to geographic and social risk data. The executive programme targets coverage of 75 percent of the population on a geographic risk map linked to the early-warning system by 2028.
As protection expands, so does its cost. But the central question is not how much the state will spend, but what social return it obtains for each dinar spent. Spending on prevention may be less costly than spending after a problem has become chronic poverty. Support for training, care, or insurance may deliver more lasting benefit than years of continued reliance on assistance. The next phase therefore requires a shift in the philosophy of evaluating social expenditure - away from counting the value of grants and the number of beneficiaries, and toward measuring the cost of preventing a family from falling into poverty, the cost of lifting it out, and the cost of preventing it from returning.
That shift also requires reducing duplication across programmes, consolidating data, improving targeting, and linking expenditure to measurable outcomes.
One of the hardest challenges in social protection concerns families who fall between poverty and stability: households that do not meet the eligibility criteria for support but lack adequate protection against a serious shock - job loss, illness, a rise in housing or healthcare costs, or the sudden loss of a primary income source. Any of these can push such a family rapidly into dependency. This group represents the real test of the strategy's preventive concept.
If the state intervenes only after a family meets the eligibility threshold, it has managed poverty. If it has the capacity to detect fragility indicators and intervene before a family slides, it has begun in earnest to prevent it.
If the state is to move from activity indicators to impact indicators, what matters is not only the number of beneficiaries, but how many families left the support system and remained outside it; how many of those referred to work were still employed after one year; how family income changed after employment; how many families returned to support after exiting; how many women entered the labour market or kept their jobs thanks to care services; how many families received more than one service within an integrated pathway; how long the response took after a shock occurred; and whether the social registry has reduced duplication and improved targeting.
By 2033, these indicators will show whether the strategy brought about genuine social transformation or merely reorganised existing programmes - the difference between managing poverty and breaking its cycle. The shift the updated strategy proposes does not rest on abolishing support, nor can it rest on the assumption that all people in poverty are able to work. It rests on calibrating the type of intervention to the nature of the vulnerability: those who can work need a pathway to sustainable economic participation; those who have temporarily lost their income need protection to prevent them from falling; and those who cannot work need ongoing protection and services.
This article was originally written in Arabic for Al Ghad.
