What Works, What Doesn't: Lessons from Social Protection Experiments Across Asia Pacific

Part 5 of the "Who Is This Crisis For?" Series — SocDem Asia Pacific: Sondang Tarida Tampubolon is the Coordinator of Social Democrats Asia Pacific (SocDem Asia Pacific) and Deputy Secretary-General of the National Democratic Party (Partai NasDem), Indonesia.

This article is part of the SocDem Asia Pacific editorial series leading up to the webinar “Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis” in September 2026.

Introduction

There is a temptation, when confronted with the scale of the problem, to conclude that nothing works.

That the informal economy is too large, the care deficit too deep, the political will too thin, and the structural barriers too entrenched for meaningful change to be possible. That the women we have met across this series—Linh, Fatima, Maria, Priya, Aisha, and Nirmala—are simply caught in systems too large and too old to be moved.

We reject that conclusion.

Not out of optimism, but out of evidence. Because across the Asia Pacific, in countries at different levels of development and with different political traditions, there are experiments underway—some successful, some partial, some instructive in their failure—that demonstrate what is possible when political will meets organized demand.

None of these experiments is perfect. None has fully solved the problem of gendered economic insecurity. But each contains lessons—about what works, what does not, and what a serious regional agenda for social protection must learn from both.

In Part 4 of this series, we asked why the state retreats and women step in. In this article, we ask a different question: Where has the state stepped forward—and what happened when it did?

What We Mean by "What Works"

Before examining specific cases, it is worth being clear about the standard we are applying.

When we ask what works, we are not asking what has produced impressive GDP growth, or what has satisfied international financial institutions, or what has generated positive headlines in development reports. We are asking something more specific: what has genuinely improved the economic security, labour market position, and care burden of women—particularly informal workers, caregivers, and young women—in ways that are measurable, sustained, and replicable?

That is a higher bar. And it means that some policies celebrated as successes in mainstream development discourse will appear here as partial achievements at best—because they have delivered growth without protection, or inclusion without equity, or coverage without adequacy.

It also means that some quieter, less celebrated experiments will receive more attention than they typically do—because they have moved the needle on the things that matter most to the women at the center of this series.

What Works: Five Lessons from the Region

Lesson 1: Universal Coverage Beats Targeted Programs — Thailand's 30-Baht Health Scheme

In 2001, Thailand introduced what became known as the 30-Baht health scheme—a near-universal health coverage program that allowed any Thai citizen to access public health services for a co-payment of 30 baht, later reduced to zero for the poorest households.

The scheme was not designed specifically as a gender policy. But its impact on women—particularly women in the informal economy—was transformative.

Before universal coverage, informal workers faced a stark choice when illness struck: pay for private care they could not afford, use public services of inadequate quality, or simply go without treatment. For women, who were more likely to be in informal work and less likely to have employer-provided health coverage, this choice was particularly acute. The 30-Baht scheme removed it.

The lesson for the region is not that Thailand's model should be replicated wholesale—it has its own limitations, including persistent quality gaps between urban and rural facilities. The lesson is structural: universal coverage, however imperfect, delivers more equitable outcomes for informal workers than targeted programs that require people to prove their poverty before accessing support.

Targeted programs sound efficient. In practice, they exclude the people who need them most — through complex eligibility criteria, administrative barriers, stigma, and the simple fact that informal workers often lack the documentation that targeting systems require. Women in the informal economy, who are least likely to have formal records of their work and income, are disproportionately excluded.

The takeaway: Design for universality. Target resources within a universal system, not instead of one.

Lesson 2: Paid Parental Leave Only Works When Fathers Use It — Mongolia and the Limits of Maternity-Only Policy

Mongolia has one of the more generous maternity leave provisions in the region—up to 120 days of paid leave at a relatively high replacement rate. On paper, this is a significant achievement.

In practice, its impact on women's labour market outcomes has been limited—because maternity leave, without corresponding paternity leave that fathers are incentivized to use, does not redistribute care. It simply formalizes the existing arrangement: women take time off for childcare, men do not, and the career gap between them widens.

The evidence from outside the region is instructive. Countries that have introduced non-transferable paternity leave—leave that fathers lose if they do not use it—have seen measurable shifts in the distribution of care within households, with downstream effects on women's labour market participation and earnings.

Across the Asia Pacific, paternity leave provisions are minimal or non-existent in most countries. Where they exist, they are typically short, poorly paid, and culturally stigmatized — men who take them are often penalized professionally or socially.

This matters enormously for young women. The care penalty — the wage and career gap that opens up between women and men as a result of care responsibilities — begins at the point of first childbirth and compounds over time. Policies that redistribute care from the moment of birth can interrupt that compounding before it begins.

The takeaway: Parental leave policy must be designed to change behavior, not just provide entitlement. Non-transferable paternity leave is not a luxury — it is a structural intervention.

Lesson 3: Organizing Informal Workers Changes What Is Politically Possible — SEWA in India

The Self-Employed Women's Association—SEWA—was founded in Ahmedabad, India, in 1972. It is, by any measure, one of the most significant labour organizing experiments in the world.

SEWA organizes women in the informal economy: home-based workers, street vendors, agricultural labourers, domestic workers, and waste pickers. It provides them not only with collective bargaining capacity but also with access to financial services, healthcare, childcare, legal support, and skills training—a model it calls "social security from below."

What SEWA demonstrates, over more than five decades of operation, is that informal workers can be organized — and that when they are organized, they can change what is politically possible.

SEWA's advocacy contributed directly to the passage of India's Unorganized Workers' Social Security Act in 2008 — the first national legislation to explicitly recognize the social protection needs of informal workers. The Act has significant limitations in implementation, and SEWA has been among its most persistent critics on those grounds. But its existence — the fact that informal workers' social protection is now a matter of national legislation rather than charitable discretion — is a direct product of organized political pressure from below.

The lesson for Asia Pacific is not that SEWA's model can be transplanted directly into other contexts. It is that the political conditions for better policy are not given — they are built. And they are built through the patient, sustained organizing of the workers who are most affected.

The takeaway: Policy change follows organized power. Investing in the organizing capacity of informal women workers is not separate from the policy agenda—it is the precondition for it.

Lesson 4: Cash Transfers Without Structural Change Reach Their Limits—Lessons from Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Conditional cash transfer programs—in which poor households receive regular cash payments in exchange for meeting conditions such as school attendance or health check-ups—have been widely implemented across the Asia Pacific, with programs in the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

The evidence on their impact is genuinely mixed, and the gender dimensions are particularly complex.

On the positive side, well-designed cash transfer programs have demonstrably reduced extreme poverty, improved school enrollment for girls, and increased utilization of health services. For the poorest households, the direct income effect is real and significant.

But the gender analysis reveals important limitations.

First, cash transfers are almost always paid to women — on the assumption that women are more likely than men to spend transfers on children and household welfare. This assumption has some empirical support. But it also reinforces the expectation that women are responsible for household welfare, without addressing the structural conditions that make that responsibility so burdensome.

Second, the conditions attached to transfers—school attendance, health visits, nutrition monitoring—almost always require women's time and labour to fulfil. The compliance burden falls on mothers, adding to their unpaid care work rather than reducing it.

Third, and most fundamentally, cash transfers do not change the structural conditions that produce poverty and insecurity. They provide income support within a broken system. They do not fix the system.

For women in the informal economy, cash transfers can provide a floor — but only if they are adequate in value, genuinely universal in coverage, and designed without conditions that add to women's care burden. And they must be accompanied by investment in the structural conditions—care infrastructure, labour market reform, and social insurance—that address the root causes of insecurity.

The takeaway: Cash transfers are a floor, not a foundation. They must be part of a broader structural agenda, not a substitute for one.

Lesson 5: Care Infrastructure Investment Pays for Itself — Evidence from Across the Region

Perhaps the most important lesson from the region's social protection experiments is also the most straightforward: investing in care infrastructure works.

The evidence is consistent across contexts. When affordable, quality childcare is available, women's labour force participation increases. When aged care services are publicly funded and accessible, women who would otherwise leave the workforce to provide care can remain employed. When the care workforce is paid fairly and covered by social insurance, it attracts and retains workers, improving quality and reducing turnover.

In South Korea, sustained public investment in early childhood education and care over the past two decades has contributed to measurable increases in women's labour force participation, particularly among mothers of young children. The investment has not been sufficient—South Korea still has significant gender gaps in employment and earnings—but the direction of effect is clear.

In New Zealand, the introduction of paid parental leave combined with subsidized early childhood education has produced similar results, with particularly significant impacts for lower-income women who previously faced the starkest choice between work and care.

Across the Pacific Island nations, community-based care models—where care infrastructure is built around existing community networks rather than imported institutional models—have shown promise in contexts where formal care systems are not yet feasible at scale.

The ADB and ILO have both made the economic case for care investment clearly and repeatedly. The evidence is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the political priority—and that is where organized pressure, regional solidarity, and the kind of advocacy that this series is building toward become essential.

The takeaway: Care infrastructure investment is not welfare spending. It is an economic investment with measurable returns. The political will to make it must be built—and it must be built now.

What Doesn't Work: Three Persistent Failures

Alongside the lessons from what works, the region's experience also offers clear evidence of what does not.

Failure 1: Gender-Neutral Policy in a Gendered World

The most consistent failure across the region's social protection landscape is the design of policies that are formally gender-neutral but functionally gender-blind.

Labour laws that apply equally to all workers but were designed for formal, full-time, male-breadwinner employment. Social insurance systems that require continuous contribution records that informal workers — disproportionately women — cannot accumulate. Pension systems that reward long formal employment careers and penalize the interrupted, part-time, informal trajectories that characterize most women's working lives.

Gender-neutral policy in a world structured by gender inequality does not produce gender-neutral outcomes. It reproduces and entrenches existing inequalities, while providing political cover for inaction on the structural changes that would actually make a difference.

Failure 2: Consultation Without Power

Across the region, governments and international institutions have developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for "consulting" women and informal workers on social protection policy. Advisory committees, stakeholder forums, gender mainstreaming processes — the architecture of consultation has expanded significantly.

But consultation without power is not participation. When women's organizations and informal worker groups are invited to comment on policies that have already been designed, their input is cosmetic. When their recommendations are noted but not acted upon, the consultation process functions as legitimation rather than accountability.

Meaningful participation means women — particularly informal workers, caregivers, and young women — having genuine decision-making power over the policies that affect their lives. That requires representation in parliaments, in trade unions, in regional forums, and in the institutions that design and implement social protection systems.

Failure 3: Short-Term Programs Without Institutional Anchoring

The region has seen numerous social protection initiatives that produced genuine results during their program period—and then disappeared when funding ended, governments changed, or political priorities shifted.

Sustainable social protection requires institutional anchoring: legislation that creates enforceable rights, funding mechanisms that are embedded in national budgets rather than dependent on donor support, and administrative systems that can deliver consistently over time.

The difference between a program and a right is the difference between a favor and an entitlement. Women in the informal economy need entitlements—not favors that can be withdrawn when they become politically inconvenient.

The Regional Dimension

The lessons from individual country experiences point toward a regional agenda—because many of the most important changes required cannot be achieved at the national level alone.

In a region with significant labour mobility, nationally fragmented social protection systems create gaps that workers fall through when they move across borders. Migrant workers — disproportionately women, disproportionately in informal and domestic work — are among the most systematically excluded from social protection across the region.

A regional minimum standard for social protection — one that establishes a floor of coverage that applies regardless of employment status, sector, or nationality — would address this fragmentation directly. It would also create upward pressure on national systems, making it politically harder for individual governments to maintain exclusions that fall below the regional standard.

The ADB and ILO have both called for expanded regional coordination on social protection. The political will to translate those calls into binding commitments has not yet materialized. Building that—through the kind of organized, cross-border solidarity that this series is working toward—is the task of the moment.

Conclusion: Evidence Is Not Enough

The evidence is clear. We know what works. We know what does not. We know what a serious regional agenda for social protection — one that genuinely addresses the feminized face of economic crisis — would look like.

What we do not yet have is the political will to implement it at scale.

That gap — between evidence and action, between recommendation and commitment, between analysis and change — is not a technical problem. It is a political one. And political problems require political solutions: organized pressure, collective voice, and the kind of regional solidarity that refuses to accept the gap as inevitable.

The women in this series — Linh, Fatima, Maria, Priya, Aisha, Nirmala, Rina, Jasmine, Divya, Sari — have not been waiting for the evidence to catch up. They have been living the consequences of its absence. They deserve more than another report. They deserve a movement.

Next week, we bring together the threads of this entire series into a concrete agenda — the demands that young women and women workers are bringing to the table at the SocDem Asia Pacific webinar in August 2026. Not as supplicants. As political actors.

This is Part 5 of the "Who Is This Crisis For?" series, a weekly editorial series by SocDem Asia Pacific leading up to the Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis webinar in September 2026.

Read Part 1: "The Feminized Face of Economic Crisis: Why Social Protection Must Be at the Heart of Regional Solidarity." https://www.socdemasiapacific.com/post/the-feminized-face-of-economic-crisis-why-social-protection-must-be-at-the-heart-of-regional-solida

Read Part 2: "She Has Three Jobs and None of Them Count: The Real Face of Women's Work in Asia Pacific." https://www.socdemasiapacific.com/post/she-has-three-jobs-and-none-of-them-count-the-real-face-of-women-s-and-youth-work-in-asia-pacific

Read Part 3: "Born Into Precarity: Why Young Women in Asia Pacific Are Inheriting a Broken Labour Market." https://www.socdemasiapacific.com/post/born-into-precarity-why-young-women-in-asia-pacific-are-inheriting-a-broken-labour-market

Read Part 4: "When the State Steps Back, Women Step In — And No One Pays Them." https://www.socdemasiapacific.com/post/when-the-state-steps-back-women-step-in-and-no-one-pays-them