Michael Samson is the Research Director of the Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI), a global research institute in Cape Town, South Africa. He has 36 years of experience working in social protection, and specialises in designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating social protection programmes and policies, and his project experience in these areas includes work in 58 countries in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific as well as many related publications. He led the international team supporting the evaluation of Thailand’s Child Support Grant, designed a long-term social protection training-of-trainer capacity development programme in Vietnam, and supported 32 other social protection policy and programme-related projects over the past fifteen years in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. He worked in Papua New Guinea on a social cash transfer feasibility study (UNICEF) and social protection policy project (ADB), a comparative social protection micro-simulation analysis of four Pacific Island countries (DFAT), a social protection review in Samoa (DFAT), a social protection policy review in the Marshall Islands (UNICEF) and various early childhood development projects for the Pacific Regional Council for Early Childhood Development (PRC4ECD). He was the lead author of three editions of the policy guide Designing and Implementing Social Protection Systems, he wrote the OECD’s policy guidance on social protection, and he convenes courses annually in Thailand, South Africa, Kenya and globally on this topic, including a Sida-funded International Training Programme in Social Protection for Sustainable Development in ten countries in Africa and Asia. His current research focuses on how social protection provides an effective policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, by reinforcing the effectiveness of public health measures, building resilience to the livelihoods shocks, and minimising the long-term developmental risks to the SDGs. Michael lectures at policy conferences and training workshops around the world. He is also on the economics faculty at the Williams College Center for Development Economics in the United States, and he has a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.