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Call for papers
WIDER Development Conference: Safeguarding tomorrow – innovative approaches to growth and equity
UNU-WIDER seeks paper submissions for the 2025 WIDER Development Conference. Over the past two decades, social protection programmes have become a widespread policy tool to reduce poverty and food insecurity in low- and middle-income countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, social safety net programmes providing cash or in-kind transfers have more than tripled since the turn of the millennium. Social protection is an important tool to achieve many SDGs, such as No Poverty, No Hunger and Reduced Inequalities.
This call for papers seeks proposals for innovative research contributions that speak to the central themes of the conference:
- Design, implementation, and financing of social protection
- The impacts of social protection on growth and development
- Social protection during crises and in humanitarian settings
- The political economy of social protection
About the conference
The 2025 WIDER Development Conference takes place in Helsinki, Finland, 09-11 June 2025, with financial support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). Over three days, it brings together academic and policy specialists from around the world to discuss the latest research on social protection in a broad sense, including its design and consequences on individuals or population groups across many dimensions of wellbeing (income, labour market outcomes, education, and health, among others).
It provides a forum to discuss innovative, theoretical, and empirical research and its policy takeaways. It concludes with the 29th WIDER Annual Lecture delivered by Professor Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and features plenary sessions in key research and policy issues, various parallel sessions on the main topics of the conference and poster sessions featuring the work of young scholars.