How successfully is social protection being delivered in Africa? What challenges remain in the extension of social protection? This study explores how social protection strategies are being implemented by African governments, with support from bilateral and multilateral donors and international and local NGOs. The social protection debate in Africa now needs to move beyond social transfers to focus on social justice, including the mobilisation of civil society to claim entitlements and rights from the state.
The need for social protection is greater in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region in terms of the depth of poverty and the range of vulnerability factors. Half of the continent’s population live in chronic poverty. The prevalence of undernourishment is twice as high in Africa as in the ‘developing world’ as a whole.
Social protection in Africa has conventionally been dominated by humanitarian relief and food-based ‘safety nets’. But the emerging social protection agenda in Africa is dominated by social assistance, specifically unconditional cash transfers. These have been used partly as an alternative to decades of emergency food aid that has had little impact on poverty or food insecurity. They have also been used in an attempt to galvanise moribund local economies through sustained injections of purchasing power.
Different African countries have responded in different ways to the social protection agenda:
- In some countries, mostly in southern Africa, governments have introduced their own welfarist programmes, such as social pensions and support to families affected by HIV and AIDS.
- In countries such as Ethiopia and Ghana, there is a genuine partnership between governments and donors in delivering social transfers.
- Many governments remain sceptical about ‘handouts’ to poor citizens, preferring to invest scarce public resources directly in production, for example through agricultural input subsidies.
- The social protection agenda is widely perceived as being donor-driven, with agencies supporting governments or funding international NGOs to deliver ‘social cash transfers’ to clusters of poor citizens.
- While cash transfers dominate the social protection agenda in Africa, they are delivered as social assistance, not grounded in entitlement-based claims or citizenship rights.
- In several African countries civil society is under-represented in domestic social protection debates.
What is needed now is a ‘transformative’ approach to social protection that focuses on rights and social justice. Transformative social protection implies mobilisation to claim entitlements and rights from the state, which involves working with local civil society organisations.
- It is important to link the delivery of social protection to the delivery of basic services, especially education and health, social welfare and child protection services.
- Specific aspects of social protection that require attention include community-based monitoring of service delivery and quality of services, building local accountability and good governance in service provision.
- There is an urgent need to think through strategies for influencing government in contexts where civil society is weak or absent.
- Shifting the social protection debate requires moving beyond social transfers, to transformative issues such as women’s reproductive health, housing, land rights and migrants’ rights to social protection.
