Social protection in Africa: Where next ?

This discussion paper is the product of a meeting hosted by RHVP in April 2010, to discuss the state of social protection in Africa and brainstorm ideas for moving forward. The paper begins by pointing out that, despite great progress in social protection in many African countries, there are still major challenges to be met: pilot social transfer projects have not scaled up and face uncertain futures, several African governments remain resistant to institutionalising national-level social transfers, lack of consensus on how to move the social protection agenda forward. After summarising the different social protection approaches, each with different results, the paper analyses the problems encountered and proposes 5 options for the future and 10 principles that should guide development partners. Several factors have been identified to explain mixed results. Social protection projects have often been initiated by donors and are not well integrated into national and local policy processes. Donors have paid too little heed to government social protection programmes and national preferences. Many social protection concepts are based on European welfare state models, and all too often have been applied in Africa without being adapted to local realities. Donors have been too focused on poverty reduction and not enough on vulnerability. Participants are usually not sufficiently involved in designing social protection programming. The 5 options for the future are:

• learn from government-driven programmes rather than set up parallel projects that have little to do with government programmes
• work through appropriate institutional mechanisms, at regional and national levels
• learn lessons for national implementation, rather than from pilot projects, which should only be used to test certain specific methods and not to prove the impact of certain approaches to poverty reduction
• promote a broader vision of social protection including reducing vulnerability
• gain a more sophisticated understanding of the political economy in each national context, and help governments develop their own vision of social protection.

CSP, IDS, ODI, RHVP, University of East Anglia June 2010