Alcázar, L., Rojas, V. y López de Romaña, E. (2021). Medidas de protección social del gobierno peruano en época de la COVID-19. Lima: UNICEF.

In the current context, where the pandemic still persists, but whose health impacts are reduced by the increasing application of vaccines, it is important to analyze what the State has done to protect the population, especially children and adolescents, from poverty. This analysis makes it possible to assess the effectiveness and relevance of the State’s response and to propose improvements to social protection, so that it has the capacity to respond in a timely manner to external shocks.

In this sense, the present study aims to analyze the social protection measures adopted by the government to mitigate the impact of the pandemic crisis on Peruvian households, with emphasis on those where children and adolescents live.

In general terms, the study identifies that the pandemic finds the Peruvian State without a social protection system, which generates a disorganized response, where the main actors associated with social protection must negotiate their roles to serve the population. Likewise, there is no strategy or capacity to address urban poverty: the actions carried out are conditioned by the lack of nominal socioeconomic information on the population living in urban areas. This led the government to respond with measures of a universal nature or with a targeting that avoided excluding households. From the management point of view, it was not clear which institutions should assume the roles required to face a crisis of unprecedented characteristics and the lack of a clear leadership on the actions to be undertaken stood out.