Rapid Scoping Review on the Topic of Ensuring Social Protection and Basic Services to Inform the United Nations Framework for the Immediate Socioeconomic Response to COVID-19

This rapid scoping review has informed the development of the UN Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery on the topic of “Ensuring Social Protection and Basic Services.” The aim was to provide a robust synthesis of key concepts and existing evidence drawn from a wide range of disciplines to support the identification and appraisal of research priorities. An emergent theme has been the notion that measures implemented in response to COVID-19 merely ameliorate symptoms of entrenched, systemic gender-, age-, and race-based inequity, inequality, and exclusion. Key findings include the critical role of contextual and community-based knowledge for informing the design, development, and delivery of programs, as well as the urgent need for implementation science to move existing knowledge into action. This review also describes how the disruption associated with “shock events” such as the COVID-19 pandemic is often associated with unusually high levels of interest and willingness to invest in programs and policies to strengthen strained systems. As such, an unprecedented window of opportunity exists to leverage measures implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to effect large-scale, sustainable change and thereby increase the resiliency of our interconnected systems for the future.