wiego.org (February 2024) In this briefing note we review the current debates on strategies, challenges and opportunities regarding registration in the context of social protection. In the first part, we will present the key concepts, approaches and debates on registration and situating it in the overall social protection system. The second section highlights the basic registration strategies, including outreach and awareness. We examine on-demand, census sweeps and other methods using existing data. Then, we move into innovative approaches to registration, where we look at the challenges and opportunities of digitization and what we can learn from digitally enabled responses to the COVID-19 crisis. We conclude by exploring the challenges faced by informal workers to be included in registration systems and the different policies implemented to specifically register these workers.