Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa's development

Abstract

Abstract The experience of sub-Saharan Africa with social development in the period between 1981 and 2005 has been grim, indeed. Over the period, policy focus has turned from a wider vision of social policy to narrow social protection concerns. This is what we refer to as the social protection paradigm (SPP). We offer an assessment of the paradigm. In its place, we offer an alternative vision encapsulated in the idea of transformative social policy, stressing the multiple roles of social policy and its wider vision of society. Social policy, in the context of meeting Africa's development challenges, must embrace these multiple roles, framed by the norms of equality and social solidarity.

Résumé L'expérience du développement social de l'Afrique subsaharienne entre 1981 et 2005 était sombre. Pendant ce période, l'attention de la politique a tourné d'une vision au sens large de la politique sociale a une plus étroite qui concerne la protection sociale. Ceci s'appelle le paradigme de la protection sociale. Nous offrons une évaluation du paradigme. A la place, nous proposons une vision alternative qui contient l'idée d'une politique sociale transitive, et qui met l'accent sur les rôles multiples de la politique sociale et une vision au sens large de la société. La politique sociale, dans le contexte des besoins de développement de l'Afrique, doit adopter ces rôles nombreux, encadrés par la vision acceptée de l'égalité et de la solidarité sociale.

Keywords:

• transformative social policy
• social protection
• Africa
• social solidarity
• cash transfer

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to several people from whom I have benefitted in the original writing of this paper or subsequent revisions: Thandika Mkandawire, a veritable mwalimu, Illechong Yi, Adebayo Olukoshi, Kola Omomowo, Michael Neocosmos, Arjan de Haan and Sarah Cook. I also acknowledge the comments from participants at the Dakar session of the preparatory workshop for the European report on development 2010, where the original and larger report was presented. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments – in matters on which I agree or disagree. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

See de Renzio and Hanlon (2008), Batley (2005), Hodges and Tibana (2004), for sources.

This targeting of ‘weak’ actors on the African landscape is not limited to the field of social policy. DFID's recent foray into the field of social science research support in Africa involved a self-conscious decision to side-step Africa's oldest and longest surviving social science research council, CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) – founded in 1973, with headquarters in Dakar, Senegal and flourishing – and to create a competing, new organisation based on the same clientele-oriented approach in which UK researchers and institutions take control of ‘capacity building’ in the field of Africa's social sciences. The assumption seems to be that such ‘capacity building’ competence is absent on the continent, yet quite a number of the used research capacity-building methods in use today were developed by CODESRIA and are still being used by the organisation. The parallel with the effort to impose a particular vision of social policy on African policymakers is instructive.

The Kalomo Project was a pilot cash transfer scheme launched in 2004 by the German development aid agency, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). It draws its name from the Kalomo District of Zambia, where the scheme was piloted.

Devereux et al. (2010) did this without linking to the policy regime that precipitated the humanitarian crisis and made no attempt to confront this in either their diagnosis or prognosis.

In this section, we draw on Adesina (2010).

See also, Arjan de Haan's Reclaiming Social Policy (2007). The definition of social policy underpinning our concept of transformative social policy was given earlier in the opening pages of this paper (Adesina 2007 and Mkandawire 2011).