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Children, Citizenship and Child Support: The Child Support Grant in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Abstract
In April 1998, the post-apartheid South African government introduced a monthly cash transfer for children in poor households. A requirement for getting the grant was that the birth of the child had to be registered, and the adult primary caregiver had to have the citizen identity document. The success of the system of support was contingent on the new democratic government's ability to integrate into one national welfare system what had been fragmented under apartheid into many racially separated systems; it also, ironically, built on the apartheid-era state pension delivery system. Within a decade the grant reached more than ten million children, and was associated with a rapid increase in birth registrations, marking the poorest children's first step into citizenship, and opening up the possibility of later access to other programmes and entitlements.
... Policy makers have only unevenly adjusted to these changes. On the one hand, the design of the Child Support Grant has proved to be sensitive to social realities, emphasising the need to 'follow the child' rather than to impose unrealistic assumptions about the coherence of family life (Lund 2012). On the other hand social protection measures for adults are still based on the fiction of full employment, so that large numbers of unemployed poor black South Africans (in particular, working age, able-bodied men) are excluded from their ambit (Seekings and Nattrass 2005;Marais 2011). ...
This paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist governmentality. Looking at South Africa's stalled agrarian transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa's unresolved democratic transition.
... It shared this underperforming status with some other upper-middle-income countries, including South Africa and Turkey, which also have made recent inroads in incorporating previously marginalised segments into the civil registry. 3 They too have implemented social policies that require identity documents along with measures that make documents easier to obtain (Lund, 2012, UNICEF, 2013. Other countries at far lower levels of development have done the same (Harbitz & Tamargo, 2009, UNICEF, 2016. ...
Identity documentation is essential to secure the rights, benefits, and services that modern states provide. Historically, significant numbers of poor Brazilians lacked core documents, beginning with a birth certificate. In recent years the government has conducted a campaign to rectify this situation. We explore why the state left so many Brazilians without a birth certificate previously and why it became intent on registering all births, as reflected in recent efforts to facilitate the process. Key in this regard is the movement from a social policy orientation that excluded poor Brazilians in the informal sector to one aimed at including them.
... Nevertheless, cash transfers have resulted in the improvement of bureaucratic capacity. Some countries such as South Africa have dramatically improved birth registration (Lund, 2012). However, since more than a third of births worldwide are not registered, many states are contracting information corporations to develop biometric registration systems in order to stabilise information on the populations they govern (Szreter and Breckenridge, 2012). ...
Since the mid-1990s, a number of governments in the global South have instituted programmes which provide regular cash grants to poor people. The results of cash transfer programmes have impressed those searching for ways to improve welfare: the depth of poverty has been reduced, more children are being educated and vaccinated, and the poor are more likely to get jobs and start enterprises. Advocates of social democracy are hopeful that this heralds the possibility of comprehensive social protection. Experiments in welfare in the global South do not, however, inevitably signal an epochal shift to a postneoliberal era. They form part of an increasingly heterodox approach which combines an enduring emphasis on liberalized economic growth with bolder biopolitical interventions for the poor.
Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly shape the provision of this program. Based on a logistic regression analysis, we measured the effect of protest participation, voting preference, and their interaction on the likelihood of CSG receipt. Our analysis showed that CSG receipt is much higher among “uncontentious supporters” of ANC and “contentious nonsupporters,” as well as those who join violent protests. This lends support for our argument that CSG is being used as a tool for electoral politics and containment of unrest, providing fresh evidence for political mediation theories of social policy.
Based on the authors’ parallel projects of research and fieldwork in urban informal settlements in Durban and Nairobi, the article uses comparison to bring out similarities and differences in the dynamics of informality in a South African and Kenyan setting. The article examines three dimensions of informality – the informal economy, informal housing and informal politics – as they play into the lives of youth, popular culture, moral debate, and local political contestations. The two historical trajectories of settler colonial state-building and urban influx control and segregation in South Africa and Kenya are contrasted, together with the struggles that accompanied decolonisation and the transitions to democracy. The article discusses the ways in which informal entrepreneurship has different weight and possibilities in the South African and the Kenyan case, and shows the impact of different expectations of state delivery in the two environments. In conclusion, the authors try to assess comparatively whether developments in the two cases of urban informal settlement in Durban and Nairobi are converging, or whether they exhibit different patterns of urban integration.
This paper is concerned with how democracy is understood and experienced in a KwaZulu-Natal municipal administration and one of the settlements it governs. Considering that democracy has a range of popular meanings, and that in South Africa it has been tied to the promise of a better life, I explore how municipal officials have identified democracy with a technopolitical future in which experts evaluate poor communities and implement infrastructure as a mechanism of improvement. I also show how residents of the settlement have become disenchanted at what they experience as democracy’s inability to deal with their basic everyday needs. Their disenchantment is directed not only at state officials, but at democracy as an ideal, and they articulate it most forcefully with a growing antipathy towards democratic rights perceived as intruding into the domestic sphere. In order to understand both the municipal state’s approach to democracy and residents’ reactions to it, I draw on recent work by Partha Chatterjee and James Ferguson to consider whether concepts of “political society” and “the left art of government” are helpful in theorising democratic governance in the South African countryside.
The South African state awards unconditional means-tested cash transfers to the caregivers of some eight million poor children. Amidst increasing demands on the state for social assistance, the question has been asked: should the Child Support Grant (CSG) be made conditional on education or health related behaviour to enhance its effectiveness? Issues relating to the popular Latin American conditional cash transfer programmes for children are summarised. The history, current reach and impact of the CSG are described, as well as administrative strengths and weaknesses in delivery. We argue that, to be in line with South Africa's Constitution, the structural problems of the supply side of education and health provision should be addressed, as well as problems with the delivery of the CSG, rather than considering whether to impose conditionalities that could further exclude poor children and their caregivers from this modest but vital form of support.
This paper examines the reach and impact of the South African Child Support Grant, using longitudinal data collected through the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies. The grant is being taken up for a third of all age-eligible resident children, and appears to be reaching those children living in the poorer households of the demographic surveillance area (DSA). Children who received the grant are significantly more likely to be enrolled in school in the years following grant receipt than are equally poor children of the same age. However, older brothers and sisters of grant recipients, when they were observed at younger ages, were less likely than other children to be enrolled in school - perhaps reflecting the greater poverty in grant-receiving households. Thus the grant appears to help overcome the impact of poverty on school enrolment.
To quantify the impact of the South African old age (social) pension on outcomes for pensioners and the prime-aged adults and children who live with them, and to examine alternative means by which pensions affect household outcomes.
We collected socioeconomic data on 290 households in the Agincourt demographic surveillance area (DSA), stratifying our sample on the presence of a household member age-eligible for the old-age pension (women aged 60 and older, men aged 65 and older).
The presence of a pensioner significantly reduces household reports that adults and, separately, children missed meals because there was not enough money for food. In addition, girls are significantly more likely to be enrolled in school if they are living with a pensioner, an effect that is driven entirely by living with a female pensioner. Our results are consistent with a model in which pensioners have a greater say in household functioning once they begin to receive their pensions.
We find a program targeted toward the elderly plays a significant role in children's health and development.
* This article is based on research conducted as part on the UNRISD Program on Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries. A version of this paper will appear in Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim, eds., Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries (2006). I would like to thank Beth Goldblatt and Francie Lund for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.
1. For an extensive discussion of these political processes, see Hassim (2002).
2. For a more extensive discussion of the women’s movement, see Hassim (2004).
3. The emphasis on the “primary caregiver” rather than the mother or even guardian was a small but important shift. As Sainsbury and others have shown, the basis of welfare entitlements is a crucial aspect of welfare states. Entitlements that privilege the head of household tend to undermine women’s independent access to benefits. On the other hand, emphasis on motherhood can equally narrow women’s access to benefits by imposing moral regulation on women. In the South African case, the emphasis on the primaiy caregiver recognizes the work of childcare regardless of who performs it-an important factor in a context in which care giving is the responsibility of aunts and grandparents. See Sainsbury (1996). See also Fraser and Gordon (1994).
4. Paradoxically, the Democratic Party, which in many respects can be seen as the party of business, has supported the introduction of BIG.
Although South Africa's democracy is only ten years old, the country has one of the most extensive welfare systems of any developing country in the world. The Constitution provides a right to social security. A monthly grant (the Child Support Grant) paid to the primary caregiver of every poor child under the age of 14 is reaching millions of children. However, the introduction of this grant coincided with the loss of a previous grant paid to the parents of the child. In South Africa today there is no financial support for parents themselves and no recognition of or compensation for their caring work. The grant has helped many mothers to feed and school their children and may also have improved their own status in some ways. At the same time, many young mothers have come under attack by being accused of becoming pregnant to access the grant and of abusing the payments. While the roll out of the grant has been very successful, problems remain in its implementation that create barriers to access for some of the most vulnerable women and their children. This assessment of the implementation of the Child Support Grant is based on the findings of a research study discussed in this article. The article also tries to develop a gendered rights framework that can be used to improve the position of women living in poverty.
In the political aftershocks of September 11, powerful interests in the United States and Britain have proposed the development of national systems of biometric identification and registration. For much of the last century, South Africans have lived with such a biometric order, and in recent years the democratic state has begun to invest in a massive scheme of digital biometrics for the delivery of benefits and the elimination of fraud. This HANIS system has been preceded by a massive project of digital biometric grant delivery that affects millions of people throughout the country. These systems are changing the nature of the state, and the relationship between private individuals and the commercial domain. For the countries considering a move from the decentralised order of paper-based identification to the new world of digital biometrics, there is much to be learned from a close study of contemporary South Africa.
The growth of South African state-provided social security is traced from its origins in British colonialism, through the consolidation under apartheid of racially discriminatory benefits mainly to protect white interests, to the present time of political change when there is a rapid move towards racial parity. It is a difficult system to understand, because of the fragmentation created by apartheid: benefits are delivered through 17 separate “governments”, geographically different from each other, using different information systems and, until recently, characterized by secrecy regarding information. This paper is based on interviews conducted in all administrations in 1991, and it focuses on the state social pensions and grants for elderly people, disabled people, child and family care, and poor relief. Major problems with the system are those of access, racial discrimination, inefficiency, corruption, and the way in which the means test is implemented. Does the social security system have a role to play in addressing the inequality and poverty produced by apartheid? In rural areas most beneficiaries live in three-generational families, and the benefit is consumed by the household. It is suggested that its potential is greatly underestimated, and rather than being seen as an expensive burden, the social security system should be enthusiastically embraced. It is already in place; it can relatively easily be made more efficient.
This article draws together unusual characteristics of the legacy of apartheid in South Africa: the state-orchestrated destruction of family life, high rates of unemployment and a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The disruption of family life has resulted in a situation in which many women have to fulfil the role of both breadwinner and care giver in a context of high unemployment and very limited economic opportunities. The question that follows is: given this crisis of care, to what extent can or will social protection and employment-related social policies provide the support women and children need?