Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, households across the Global South, including in South Africa, were already grappling with increasing levels of poverty, unemployment and rising food prices. The consequence of this was widespread food insecurity and precarity.
In South Africa, where a consistent decrease in poverty levels and reported hunger was observed in the first 16 years of democracy between 1994 and 2011, this was attributed to the country’s social welfare system which dispenses cash transfers to more than 18 million people every month. However, from 2015 we started to see steady increases in all the poverty, food insecurity and child malnutrition indicators. It was against this background of high levels of poverty and deprivation that COVID-19 hit the country with the highest Gini-coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) in the world.
For low-income mothers and primary caregivers of young children, the early days of COVID-19 pushed them below the precarious safety net that was provided by South Africa’s social welfare system. It shattered the reciprocal networks that kept destitution at bay, because suddenly everyone they knew around them was out of work and without an income and they could not borrow or barter food items with them. Mothers and primary caregivers were also unable to engage in the informal, low-paid, casual work they usually rely on to supplement the small Child Support Grant – a cash transfer for children from low-income households – due to lockdown restrictions. The immediate consequences of the first few months of lockdown in low-income households were loss of income and worsened hunger for caregivers and children, in already poor living conditions characterised by informality, overcrowding and poor access to clean water and adequate sanitation.
Poor living conditions made it impossible to observe safety measures to protect against COVID-19, such as social distancing and hygiene practices. Households also experienced increased demands on food budgets, with children needing to eat all three meals at home, instead of just one, because of the closure of schools and the temporary suspension of the South African National School Nutrition Programme.
As lockdown restrictions eased, even as COVID-19 transmission rates increased, mothers were faced with the impossible choice of resuming their informal work activities to make a living and risk exposure to the virus, or to stay at home and have no food for themselves and their children, a dilemma one mother called a choice ‘between hunger and death’.
Confronted with the constant stress of trying to figure out how to provide for their children and families, women bore the brunt of the pandemic in their roles as ‘shock absorbers’ for their households in which they held the dual role of homemaker and caregiver, as well as needing to soothe and calm their partners who were distressed about lockdown restrictions and the resultant lack of income. One of our research participants captured this predicament well: “I am the one who has to figure out what to do, I am the one the children come to.” Another said: “You know men, they can’t cope with feeling useless.”
The lockdown exposed deep flaws and gaps in social security systems across many low- and middle-income countries which hadn’t before provided for low-income mothers and caregivers of young children, nor for working-aged able-bodied adults.
In the case of South Africa, this led, for the first time since the dawn of democracy, to provision for low-income, able-bodied working-aged adults, in the form of a cash transfer. The South African government introduced a special COVID-19 social and economic relief package that included two new temporary grants – one a Caregiver’s Allowance for low-income primary caregivers of children in receipt of the Child Support Grant; and the other a cash transfer called the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant for able-bodied 18–59 year olds without an income.
Ultimately, however, this social relief package failed to protect low-income households and families against the worst economic impacts of the pandemic due both to the temporary nature of the relief measures and the lack of post-lockdown provision for primary caregivers. This is testament to the inherent limitations of the Social Protection Paradigm applied in South Africa. This mainly focuses on vulnerability instead of capability, with a particular preference for small specific cash transfers that target the ultra-poor, instead of universal, broad-based ’Cash Plus‘ measures that address the structural factors that create vulnerability in the first place.
Despite this, the speed with which South Africa was able to implement new cash transfers and other relief measures during COVID-19 presents opportunities for a more transformative social policy approach that goes beyond the alleviation of chronic poverty, and instead focuses on the productive, redistributive, protective elements of social policy, underpinned by notions of rights, equality and social solidarity.
Wanga Zembe-Mkabile is a Senior Specialist Scientist in the Health Systems Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. She has Masters and DPhil qualifications in Social Policy from the University of Oxford. Her main interests are research and teaching in social policy, specifically as this relates to social determinants of maternal and child health.
‘We should not have to choose between hunger and death’: exploring the experiences of primary caregivers of recipients of a South African child cash transfer programme during COVID-19 lockdown in Cape Town, South Africa by Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, Vundli Ramokolo and Tanya Doherty for the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice is available Open Access on the Bristol University Press website here.
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