UNICEF Türkiye commissioned this assessment after the February 2023 earthquakes, which affected 11 provinces and 14 million people. The government had used the existing social protection system to deliver TRY 10,000 to over a million affected families, but the response was assembled in real time. The question was whether the system could do this faster, more inclusively, and without depending on ad-hoc decisions when the next shock arrived.
What I did
I ran the assessment against UNICEF’s six-module SRSP Readiness Assessment Tool, combining a review of administrative data (social registry, programme reach, financing flows) with stakeholder consultations at national and provincial level. I used three recent shocks as case studies: the Syrian refugee response since 2014, the COVID-19 cash expansion that reached around six million households, and the 2023 earthquake response.
Strengths were easy to find. ISAIS, the social registry, holds data on more than 30 million citizens. Over 1,000 Social Assistance and Solidarity Foundations operate nationally. AFAD, the disaster management presidency, has the logistics and field presence to coordinate a major emergency.
The gaps were more specific. There is no legal trigger that expands benefits automatically when an emergency is declared. MoFSS and AFAD have no standing coordination protocol. There is no contingency fund for shock response. Hazard maps and the social registry sit in different agencies and aren’t routinely overlaid, so officials can identify the poor or the disaster-exposed, but not both at once before a shock hits. Refugees and informal workers fall outside the national system entirely: 3.7 million people are supported through the EU-funded Emergency Social Safety Net, which delivers reliably but has never been integrated into the permanent system.
Outcomes
The public deliverable is Ready to Respond: How Türkiye’s Social Protection Can Withstand the Next Shock (UNICEF Türkiye, June 2025). It sets out four lines of action, sequenced over short, medium and long-term horizons:
- Governance and coordination: a formal MoFSS-AFAD task force, legal triggers tied to disaster declarations.
- Financing: ring-fenced contingency lines, contingent credit (CAT-DDO), parametric insurance, multi-year SP emergency reserves.
- Delivery and data: ISAIS-AFAD interoperability, pre-registration of at-risk households in disaster-prone zones, anticipatory actions tied to hazard forecasts.
- Programme design: child- and caregiver-sensitive top-ups, school-conditionality waivers during disruptions, an integration pathway for refugees and informal workers.
I also prepared an internal cash preparedness action plan for the UNICEF country office.
What this means
Türkiye is not a country that needs to build social protection from scratch. The system has reach, infrastructure and political will. What it doesn’t yet have is the apparatus to use those strengths predictably the moment a shock hits. This assessment sets out, concretely, what that apparatus would look like.