Universal social protection schemes in forced displacement settings: Evidence from Colombia

With forcibly displaced persons reaching 123.2 million people globally in 2024, host low‐ and middle‐income countries face a dual social protection coverage challenge: including new populations while their own systems cover less than a third of their citizens. Focusing on the case of Colombia, this article uses a mixed‐methods approach, combining tax‐benefit microsimulation and expert interviews, to assess the poverty impacts of universal‐like cash transfers for Colombians as well as for migrants and refugees from Venezuela resident in Colombia. While large UBI‐like transfers can dramatically reduce poverty (by up to 15 percentage points (pp) for Colombians and 27 pp for Venezuelans), budget‐neutral scenarios are detrimental to the poorest households. The qualitative evidence points to a gradual targeted universalism approach prioritizing specific life‐cycle risks as the most viable strategy in fiscally constrained, high‐informality contexts.