This paper is thus of a consultative nature. We hope that it is the beginning of a wider
debate between social security stakeholders, researchers, practitioners and decision-makers
as to how to provide some form of social security to the majority of the world’s
populations and to ensure that the human right to social security (article 22 of the United
Nations Declaration of Human Rights) can be made a reality in the shortest possible time.
In the course of that debate we shall almost certainly have to modify our views, but we
hope that the basic approach that underpins our thinking – i.e. a rights-based approach that
advocates universal access to social security – is flexible and open enough to achieve a
wide consensus on the two central objectives of social security: poverty alleviation and the
granting to all people of the opportunity to live their lives in the absence of debilitating
material insecurity.
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