Social protection programmes

According to Devereux (2003), social protection means providing social assistance to those who are chronically unable to make ends meet, as well as social insurance against transitory fluctuations in household access to food. Such a concept describes all initiatives that provide income (cash) and/or consumption (food) transfers to the poor, being distinguished from other development interventions in that social protection is not intended to promote economic growth, though it is intended to alleviate poverty and situations of food insecurity. In general, economic growth aims to alleviate poverty and food insecurity, while social protection aims to reduce vulnerability. This section aims to determine whether Southern African governments have made a special effort to address the food security needs of the poor in the region, as well as to identify the problems facing governments in delivering safety net services.

School feeding programmes are one social protection instrument that can contribute to food security in the Southern African region. Supplementary and school feeding programmes aim to improve nutritional standards for a selected target group (Stevens, 1979). The provision of a meal at school relieves a family of the burden of feeding the child at home, especially when food prices are high.

In 1996, enrolment at one primary school in Malawi rose by 26% after WFP introduced a school feeding project (Dil, 1996). Learner performance has also been seen to improve in schools serviced by school feeding schemes, with pass rates being proven to increase and drop-out rates to decrease, as the cognitive processes of malnourished children were enhanced by their consuming a nutritious meal at school. Figure 14 shows that Zimbabwe was the leading WFP beneficiary in the region in 2004 and 2005, as regards children enrolled in its School Feeding Programme, in terms of which 429,442 and 1,110,674 children received school meals, respectively. The total number of children receiving school meals in SADC was 1,428,304 in 2004 and 2,447,967 in 2005 (WFP, 2006).

12 Social protection programmes referred to in terms of this argument include only long-term food security programmes, such as school feeding, social grants and poverty alleviation programmes undertaken in Southern Africa.

Source: Adapted from WFP (2006).

Figure 14. WFP beneficiaries – Children enrolled in school feeding programme in SADC, 2004 & 2005

According to Devereux (2003), despite efforts to raise enrolment ratios, a common response to chronic and transitory food insecurity has been to withdraw children from school. Such a move has been documented as a coping strategy adopted during the food crisis in Southern Africa in 2001 in all six affected countries,¹³even in countries where education is free: during a crisis in livelihood, access to education was related to household wealth. Whether education is seen as a basic human right or as an investment in a country’s economic future, it is important to find ways of keeping children in school by reducing absenteeism and drop-outs levels encountered especially during financially straitened times.

According to the government of Malawi (2002, cited in Deveruex, 2003), that particular country has sought to improve the quality of life of the poor in the past in spite of the following problems and limitations:

13 For evidence of the impact of the 2001/02 food crisis on learner (and teacher) absenteeism in Malawi see Gallagher et

0 200000 400000 600000 800000 1000000 1200000

Angola Congo (DRC) Lesotho Malawi Mozambique Swaziland Tanzania Zambia Zimbabwe

Country

Beneficiaries 2004 2005

• Apart from the enforcement of a minimum wage, market-based policies, consisting of price controls, price subsidies and minimum wages, when found to be inefficient, fiscally unsustainable and mostly of benefit to the relatively well off, were abolished.

• Administered social protection programmes, consisting of nutrition supplements, free food distribution, free input distribution, and food-, cash- and inputs-for-work, were found to be generally “fragmented, uncoordinated and poorly targeted, suffering from both inclusion and exclusion errors”: pp22.

• Direct assistance and social welfare transfers administered by the Department of Social Welfare, the Malawi Council for the Handicapped and the Department of Disaster Preparedness, Relief and Rehabilitation have been “small in size and limited in coverage, largely due to fiscal constraints”: pp22.

• Informal safety nets, consisting of extended family and community support systems, “have become over-stretched and vulnerable to shocks due to increased poverty and the HIV/AIDS scourge”: pp23.

The food insecurity experienced in Southern Africa during 2001/02 demonstrated the inadequacies of social protection programmes in the region. Lesotho, for example, lacked specific focus on social safety net programmes, with poverty reduction and food security strategies being aimed at

“sustained economic growth and poverty reduction in the context of macro-economic stability”

(Kingdom of Lesotho, 2000, cited in Devereux, 2003: pp21). However, in Mozambique, following the rapid growth experienced since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, poverty and food insecurity reduction programmes stressed continued economic growth and improved productivity, with almost no mention being made of activities related to social protection or the needs of vulnerable groups. Such programmes, thus, failed to achieve the expected results, and activities to improve the nutrition situation were mainly confined to increasing agricultural output (Government of Mozambique, 2003, cited in Devereux, 2003). Zambia’s range of consumer subsidies on maize and agricultural inputs shrunk during the 1980s and early 1990s. As in other countries in the region, such market liberalisation undermined smallholders’ access to inputs and reintroduced food price volatility – two significant sources of vulnerability during the food crisis of 2001/02. Poverty and food insecurity reduction programmes adopted in the region included no measures either to restore access to agricultural inputs or to stabilise food prices (Devereux, 2003).

According to Chikwanha-Dzenga (1999, cited in Devereux, 2003), Zimbabwe may have had the

fiscal and administrative capacity to implement effective and comprehensive social protection, but the failure of its economic growth strategy caused the government to implement an ad hoc series of welfare projects, consisting of seed packs and food handouts, that bought electoral popularity, but also generated widespread dependence on food aid. “The task to cater for the well-being of Zimbabwe’s poor in the rural areas has thus been left largely to the NGOs, with the government frequently alleviating immediate suffering through seed packs and drought relief food (Chikwanha-Dzenga, 1999 cited in Devereux, 2003).” It is unrealistic to extend certain social protection concepts, such as social pensions (as adopted in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana), to much poorer countries in the region.

In terms of Devereux’s findings (2001), non-contributory state pensions were introduced first in South Africa in 1928, with eligibility being extended to white Namibians during the 1940s, but to African Namibians only in 1973. Initially motivated by a complex combination of welfare and political objectives, including the control of Africa urbanisation and the intent to ‘win hearts and minds’ during South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, the social pension has sustained millions of poor families for decades. Despite such social pensions reducing the levels of poverty and promoting social development, according to Devereux (2001), the social pension in Namibia is currently being subjected to close public scrutiny, with concerns that it is poorly targeted and

‘fiscally unsustainable’, motivating recent proposals to introduce means testing – as in South Africa – to reduce the number of claimants, and to restrict payment increases below current inflation rates.

According to Samson (2004), five countries in Africa have non-contributory social pensions: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Mauritius. The costs associated with the administration of these social pensions vary among these countries when measured as a percentage of the country’s GDP, with their forming 3% of that of South Africa was 3% of GDP, 2% of that of Mauritius, 1,4%

of that of Lesotho, 0,7% of that of Namibia, and 0,4% of that of Botswana (see Figure 15).

According to Samson (2004), social transfers (pensions) in South Africa support economic growth along multiple dimensions, substantially reducing poverty and destitution among all households by 21% and 32%, respectively.

Source: Adapted from Samson (2004).

Figure 15. Non-contributory social pension costs as % of GDP in SADC

Social grants in South Africa play a critical role in reducing poverty and promoting social development, as shown by a study undertaken by EPRI (2004) to evaluate the social and economic impact of state old age pensions (SOAP), disability grants (DGs), child support grants (CSGs), care dependency grants (CDG), foster care grants (FCGs) and grants-in-aid (GIAs). In terms of health, education, housing and vital services, such social grants were found to reduce poverty, regardless of which methodology was used to quantify the impact measure or to identify the poverty line concerned. The current social security system is most successful when measured in terms of destitution, with its impact being smallest when poverty lines ignore economies of scale and adult equivalence issues. For instance, social grants in South Africa reduce the poverty headcount measure by 4.3%, as measured against the Committee of Inquiry’s expenditure poverty line (which possesses no scales). The social security system, however, reduces 45% of the total rand destitution gap – an impact which is more than ten times greater (EPRI, 2004).

EPRI (2004), when using the Committee of Inquiry’s aforementioned expenditure poverty line,

South Africa, 3%

Lesotho, 1.4%

Botswana, 0.4%

Mauritius, 2%

Namibia, 0.7%

detected that a 10% increase in the take-up of SOAP reduces the poverty gap by only 1.2%, with full take-up being reduced by only 2.5%. The take-up rate for the SOAP is already very high, and many of the elderly who are eligible for the pension, but who do not receive it, are not among the poorest of South Africans. As a result, extending the SOAP still further has limited potential as a poverty reducing measure. Extensions of the DG offer greater promise, although at substantially greater expense. A 50% increase in DG take-up would reduce the total rand poverty gap by 1.7%, while full take-up would generate a 5.1% reduction. The greatest poverty-reducing potential lies with the progressive extension of the child support grant. Extending the eligibility age to 14 would reduce the poverty gap by 16.6%, while a further extension to age 18 would reduce the existing gap by 21.4%. Increasing the real grant payment (as the government did in 2003) would generate an even greater impact. Extending the child support grant to age 14 would yield a 22% poverty gap reduction, while an extension to age 18 would reduce the poverty gap by 28.3%. Combining the higher CSG extended to age 14 with the full take-up of the SOAP and the DG would reduce the total rand poverty gap by 29%.

According to Smith and Subbarao (2003, cited in FFSSA, 2004), in the absence of commitments on the part of donors to fund recurrent social protection interventions, the government provision of social protection is prioritised in relation to other pressures on limited government expenditure.

Common characteristics of very poor countries are very low average incomes; the absence of a growth path to reduce poverty in the near future; limited resources to fund transfers to the poor, and early stages of transition out of subsistence agriculture. Such characteristics serve as barriers constraining the implementation of effective public safety nets. According to the Forum for Food Security in Southern Africa (FFSSA) (2004), financial dilemmas were not the only factors constraining policy choices aimed at social protection. Effective safety net interventions require sufficient administrative capacity within government to design programmes, to identify the right beneficiaries correctly and to deliver social services to them. In many countries in Southern Africa, institutional capacity is still lacking in this respect.