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This paper builds on an earlier briefing note on the “Factors affecting the usefulness of existing social protection databases in disaster preparedness and response” (Barca and O’Brien, 2017) – co‑financed by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and DFID. It sets out to further document countries’ experiences to date leveraging existing social protection data and information systems before, during, and after a shock occurs. 

Given the potential breadth of this topic, the paper limits the scope of analysis in several ways. First of all, it focuses on social assistance and not social insurance – while acknowledging that social insurance could also play an important role in response to shocks. Secondly, it focuses entirely on social assistance data on households and individuals, not on the broader set of data that could also play a role in regard to better planning and responding to shocks (e.g. data on finance, human resources, etc). Third, it gives prominence to the analysis of the potential of existing data for vertical and horizontal expansions, and for piggybacking – primarily as these are most discussed in the literature. This choice has determined a focus on the role of existing data for identifying beneficiaries and delivering benefits to them, rather than the broader role of data for informing policy decisions.

This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 starts by providing some de ni ons and context on social assistance data and information systems. Section 3 o ers a framework to diagnose any existing system on the basis of six complementary dimensions of “data quality” that enhance or limit their poten al uses in emergency contexts. Section 4 analyses global experiences along the response cycle, focusing on the potential for leveraging exis ng data, information systems, and capacity. Section 5 analyses the potential benefits, risks, and trade‐offs of using pre‐positioned data and information systems versus “starting from scratch”. Section 6 offers some overarching conclusions and broad recommendations.