COVID-19: What Does it Mean for Digital Social Protection

Seminar abstract

COVID-19 has hit a world in which social protection schemes are increasingly augmented with digital measures.

Digital identity schemes are especially being adopted to match citizens' data with social protection entitlements, enabling authentication through demographic and, increasingly, biometric data at the point of access.

In this talk, Dr Masiero will discuss three sets of implications that COVID-19 has yielded on digital social protection, whose central trade-off, increasing the probabilities of accurate user identification, at the cost of greater exclusions. has become even more problematic during the crisis.

Dr Masiero argues that three forms of data injustice; legal, informational and design-related, previously identified as datafied social protection schemes, will need to be monitored in the post-pandemic scenario.

Finally, Dr Masiero observes the crisis exposes the long term need to place digitally within social protection schemes that expand user entitlements rather than constraining them.

Implications of such reflections are drawn for the study of data-based social welfare interventions.

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Speaker bio

Dr Silvia Masiero is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the University of Oslo, Department of Informatics.

Her research operates within the area of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D), with a focus on the role of digital platforms in socio-economic development processes.

She has conducted extensive work on the computerisation of India's main food security programme, the Public Distribution System (PDS), and on the adoption of ICTs in core aspects of the Indian public sphere including elections, rural employment guarantees and programmes of social protection.

Two further areas of current research interests of Dr Masiero, includes digital business models in social entrepreneurship and the adoption of ICTs in contexts of humanitarian emergency, such as the current global refugee crisis.