Armando Barrientos, David Hulme and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa investigate lessons and challenges for social protection in Sub-Sahran Africa. Presented at 'Moving Forward with Pro-poor Reconstruction in Zimbabwe' International Conference, Harare, Zimbabwe, (25 and 26 August 2009)

1. Social protection in sub-Saharan Africa
Lessons and Challenges
Armando Barrientos, David Hulme, and Miguel Nino-Zarazua
Brooks World Poverty Institute
The University of Manchester
www.bwpi.manchester.ac.uk www.chronicpoverty.org

2. The global rise of social protection
• Global rise of social protection programmes in developing
countries (Mexico’s Oportunidades, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, India’s
Employment Guarantee Scheme, China’s Minimum Living
Subsidy Scheme and many more, South Africa’s grants)
• What is Social Protection?
– “public actions taken in response to levels of vulnerability, risks, and
deprivation, which are deemed socially unacceptable within a given polity
and society” (Conway, de Haan and Norton 2000).
• Social Insurance, labour market regulation, social assistance
– Social assistance includes tax-financed, government provided, instruments
focused on poverty

3. Social assistance and poverty analysis
• Informed by new perspectives on poverty:
– depth and severity of poverty, not just headcount
– poverty is multidimensional,
– duration is extremely important (poverty traps)
• Household agency and productive capacity
• Reducing poverty in the future by reducing vulnerability
(…to poverty)
• Transfers must be regular and reliable, and over an
appropriate period of time, to enable investment

4. In Sub-Saharan Africa?
• Social pensions in Southern cone (South Africa, Namibia,
Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland)
• ‘Older’ schemes Zambia’s PWAS, Mozambique FSB; and
pilot transfer programmes (Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Nigeria,
Ghana…), Ethiopia’s PSNP
• West and Central Africa – UNICEF Report
• Second-generation PRSs. National Social Protection
Strategies in Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda and Uganda -
Livingstone Process – African Union, ministerial level
• Shift in aid modalities: from emergency aid to predictable
budget support

5. Main Lessons I
• Importance of knowledge base
– Poverty and vulnerability profiles are essential
• Political and public support for social protection
is key to its sustainability
– Weak ‘demand’ for social protection
– Political systems fail to aggregate preferences
– ‘Poverty reduction is a problem for donors’
• Delivery Ministries are weak and have limited
policy formulation and delivery capacity

6. Uganda. Estimated impact on the poverty gap of allocating 1% of GDP in different ways.
(Simulations assume that perfect targeting is costless, and that beneficiary households share
transfers equally among household members)
baseline all children Orphans all children in
poverty Elderly Elderly in
poverty
Children in
bottom decile
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Poverty
gap 8.7 8 8 7.5 8.2 7.5 6.4

7. Main Lessons II
• Diversity in design of current programmes
– Programme design involves adaptation
• Scale and scope are most important
• ‘social protection is not enough’, we also
need growth and public services
• tackle both ‘current’ and ‘future’ poverty

8. Armando Barrientos/2005
Village committee in Kalomo District in Zambia responsible for the
implementation of the Social Transfer Pilot Programme

9. Key Challenges
• Learning from past efforts
• Finance:
– Resources required are less than 1% GDP
– Domestic financing in the medium run
– ‘Socialisation’ of costs of poverty versus ‘resource mobilisation’
• Capacity building
• Coordination and integration of social assistance
with social policy and labour market policy
• Institution building not emergency safety nets
• Reaching all those in poverty