Abstract
Section 1 of this paper discusses the bottlenecks and barriers that hinder the extension of social protection in rural areas. It also acknowledges the heterogeneity of rural populations in terms of income-generating activities, employment status or land tenure and aims to identify specific barriers, as well as factors that often intersect and compound access to social protection. Section 2 builds on that analysis and presents approaches and country examples for tackling the barriers identified. Section 3 distills some key lessons learned and outlines a joint FAO and ILO approach to extending social protection to rural populations.