Basic social security is demonstrating a capacity to reduce poverty and enable inclusive growth and development. It takes different forms, including:

• cash transfers
• pensions
• social health insurance
• employment generation
• conditional cash transfer schemes.

For aid donors, making routine investments to help support national programmes for basic social security in developing countries could be an effective use of aid budgets – and support the broader agenda to bolster national administrations.

This form of global assistance, with its emphasis on insurance and investment in a shared problem, puts aid in a different context – it is not simply 'money expended overseas' with its connotations of international charity.

Very basic social assistance could probably be financed with around 2% of low-income country GNI – between US$13 billion and US$26 billion a year – well within the ambit of 0.7% of donor country GNI.

Governments of poor countries are already choosing to spend public funds on basic social assistance and noting its effectiveness as a weapon to fight poverty.

For aid recipients, social security and inter-country transfers represent opportunities for basic rights such as education and health that not only underpin human security, but provide a degree of choice and the opportunity to earn a living.

Human security and development are a standard part of the social and economic architecture of most developed countries. Now that we have a global economy, a logical extension of this would be to assume that there is a case for building international transfers between richer and poorer countries into the global architecture.