Social Vouchers - Innovative Tools for Social Inclusion and Local Development

Over the last 70 years, social vouchers have been developed in more than 40 countries, including 19 EU member states, for use by an estimated 80 million people worldwide. Social vouchers are now widely recognised for their contribution to local economic development, well-being and social impact, and valued for the benefits they create such as better nutrition and access to goods and services; job creation and formalisation of work; increased tax revenues; and greener purchasing power. Social vouchers are increasingly seen as a viable solution for achieving specific social, economic and environmental goals, and their use is gaining momentum.

As countries begin to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, national and local governments increasingly see social vouchers as an efficient way to stimulate recovery efforts via immediate consumption (e.g. consumption vouchers in Belgium) or target people and sectors that need them most (e.g. vouchers for informal workers in Brazil, culture vouchers in France). As we seek to build back better, how can the potential of social vouchers be more effectively leveraged to strengthen the recovery? This webinar will launch the OECD report on Social Vouchers: Innovative Tools for Social Inclusion and Local Development. It will explore how social vouchers have been and are being successfully deployed to meet the urgent needs created by the pandemic and examine what this success means for the use of social vouchers in the future.