When Julia returned home after Hurricane Fiona passed in September 2022, she found a desolate scene. "The hurricane destroyed everything. It was a disaster," she recalls.
However, with the swift response from the Dominican government through the Emergency Bonus (Bono de Emergencia), she was able to mitigate Fiona's impact on her family's economy and gradually recover her smile. "For four months, they deposited twenty thousand pesos that I used to buy groceries," she remembers. Additionally, Julia received help to repair much of the damage to her home.
Julia regularly receives other financial aid which, like the Emergency Bonus, is supported by the World Bank and aimed at promoting food security, nutrition, and efficient energy use through programs such as Aliméntate, Bonoluz, and Bonogas. All these aids are part of SUPERATE, the most important program in the Dominican Republic's social protection system.
SUPERATE also helps vulnerable Dominican families by providing them with opportunities to invest in their children's health and education through conditional cash transfers. These transfers ensure certain criteria are met, such as school attendance for children. Additionally, it aims to support participants with training to develop job skills and helps them establish connections to improve their integration into the labor market, especially among women who experience greater inequality according to a recent gender assessment by the World Bank.
These initiatives are complemented by the Emergency Bonus whose main objective is to help the poorest and most vulnerable households affected by disasters or climate change.
The Dominican Republic's adaptive social protection system has become a reference for other countries in the region and globally.
"This is the result of the government's continuous work with support from international organizations like the World Bank," explains Alexandria Valerio, World Bank representative in the Dominican Republic.
According to the World Bank's note "Towards Adaptive Social Protection Systems in Latin America and the Caribbean," adaptive social protection system approaches recognize that these systems can cushion various shocks' consequences on livelihoods, incomes, food security, and household assets. To this end, governments must work on four pillars: data and information; programs; financing; institutions; and coordination.
The success of the Dominican system lies in developing these four pillars:
1. Data and Information: The SIUBEN (the single beneficiary system) identifies poor and vulnerable households according to their poverty levels. It collects a basic needs questionnaire (FIBE) that identifies poverty combinations and degrees of impact.
2. Programs: Once created in 2021, the Emergency Bonus has been used for various disasters like Hurricane Fiona. The bonus helped 34,000 poor families recover from its consequences.
3. Financing: The Emergency Bonus technical committee sends impact reports to request necessary funds from the Ministry of Finance.
4. Institutions: The Emergency Bonus is institutionalized by presidential mandate with established coordination routes within government and international organizations.
The success of this adaptive social protection system lies in its response to extreme climate events like Hurricane Fiona and crises such as COVID-19 when approximately 1.6 million households benefited—doubling pre-pandemic coverage—and avoiding an additional increase in poverty rates up to six percentage points.
In a challenging context, this experience demonstrates that adaptive social protection is a powerful tool for reducing poverty and vulnerability while promoting sustainable growth.
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