Tackling child poverty in South Africa: Implications of ubuntu for the system of social grants

Abstract

In South Africa both liberal and more communitarian and relational discourses of citizenship can be seen – the latter in the form of the southern African idea of ubuntu. Policy for assisting children, however, is dominated by the framework of liberal citizenship, most clearly through the Bill of Rights and in particular the Child Support Grant. Using analyses from a purpose-built microsimulation model we show how a neglect of children's broader relationships in the current liberal citizenship inspired policy context limits the effectiveness of the child poverty strategy. The empirical analyses demonstrate how a greater recognition by policymakers of the relational principles of ubuntu could be expected to have more effect on reducing child poverty.

Keywords:

• child poverty
• Child Support Grant
• citizenship
• microsimulation
• social grants
• ubuntu

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor Holly Sutherland and colleagues at the University of Essex for sharing the EUROMOD model.

Notes

³Ultra-poor households are households earning less than R800 per month.

⁴The South African government publishes both narrow (or official) and expanded unemployment statistics. The official figure includes those economically active individuals who were out of work in the past week, would like to work and could start within the next two weeks, and who have taken active steps to find work in the past month. The expanded version drops the active work seeking criterion.

⁵Calculated using data from the GHS 2005 based on a household poverty line of R1200 per month.

⁶In citizenship theory, examples of civil rights are the right to free speech and the right to hold property, examples of political rights are the right to vote and to form political associations, and examples of social rights are rights to cash transfers or services such as health and education. The distinctions between the three types are of course not always completely clear in practice.

⁷SAMOD was developed by Kate Wilkinson.

⁸Further details of SAMOD can be found in Wilkinson (2009).

⁹Equivalised income is used to create comparable household incomes across households of different sizes.

¹⁰In this scale, adult equivalents per household = (a + (c * b))^d using values c = 0.75 and d = 0.86, which align with the implicit equivalence scales derived by Potgieter (Woolard & Leibbrandt, 1999).

¹¹Assuming that means tests are applied on non-equivalised household incomes as is currently the case.