Source: Constructed by the author using data from Weigand and Grosh 2008, and author’s data on South Africa.
Social Policy
In 1987 Iliffe described how the ‘African poor’ had throughout history been forced to rely on their own ingenuity because there were few other sources of support. Iliffe argued that colonial states had played a very limited role in social welfare. In the 1940s, colonial states developed policies for policing specific categories of the supposed poor (notably ‘vagrants’ and ‘juvenile delinquents’ in town), and in the 1950s they began to organize contributory insurance or provident schemes for small numbers of formal sector employees. Caring for the poor, however, was left to kin and charity (mostly church-based). The Great Depression and Second World War had pushed colonial officials towards ‘development’ as their primary strategy for reducing poverty, and little changed after independence. The family remained the ‘first defence’ against poverty. In Iliffe’s account, at best, post-colonial states performed the functions of their predecessors. When civil war or famine resulted in prospective starvation, it was generally up to international relief agencies to limit mortality. South Africa was an exception to this general picture, with a variety of formal state interventions from the 1930s (Iliffe 1987).
Iliffe’s implicit assessment that there were no ‘welfare states’ in Africa (with the possible exception of South Africa) was reiterated emphatically in a much more recent assessment by Bevan (2004), in a volume on ‘welfare regimes’ across the global South (Gough et al. 2004). Bevan was tasked with locating countries in Africa in a broader typology of ‘welfare regimes’, to use a term developed by the Scandinavian scholar Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) in his analysis of the different worlds of ‘welfare capitalism’ in the global North. Bevan suggests that African states do so little to provide their citizens with any kind of economic security that most African countries should be understood in terms of ‘informal security regimes’, meaning that any income security is provided through informal, mostly kin-based, mechanisms. Pension programmes are the preserve of the middle class, the poor hardly benefit from public education, and public healthcare is even worse. Countries with violent, predatory states (such as Sudan or Sierra Leone in the 1990s) should be understood as ‘insecurity regimes’ because the state destroys livelihoods and deepens income insecurity (among other forms of insecurity).
Data on public expenditure, however, suggest a rather more complex picture. Detailed data on public finances are scarce or unreliable across much of Africa. Weigand and Grosh (2008) collated data from eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa (and another five in North Africa) as part of a cross-national study of social spending, i.e. public expenditure on social insurance, social assistance, education, and health. (Social insurance refers to contributory programmes that insure contributors against risks – including risk of illness, long life, and sometimes unemployment – that result in lowered income; social assistance refers to non-contributory, tax- or donor-financed cash transfer programmes, often targeted on the poor through means-testing. Weigand and Grosh include under ‘social assistance’ related programmes such as price subsidies and public works programmes). They found that social spending in the eight sub-Saharan countries in the early 2000s or late 1990s amounted to more than 13 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). This was a lower proportion than in post-communist Eastern Europe and Central Asia (more than 17 per cent), but it was the same proportion of GDP as in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East (including the five North African countries), and was higher than in South or East Asia. In terms of spending as a share of GDP, these African countries certainly look like welfare states.
There are several reasons why these African welfare states have generally been overlooked. One is that, as we shall see, the big increases in spending were generally late in the twentieth century. Second, they have a distinctive pattern of expenditure. Spending on both social insurance and public health was low in these selected African countries, at less than 3 per cent of GDP each (although North African countries spend somewhat more on social insurance). Expenditure on public education, however, was high, and expenditure on social assistance was higher (in proportion to GDP) than in any other region – higher even than in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It might not be surprising that, by a long stretch, Mauritius is the highest spender on ‘social assistance’ as defined by Weigand and Grosh in the global South, or that South Africa is not far behind. However, Iliffe would probably not have anticipated that Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Malawi were the second, third, and fourth highest spenders on social assistance in the global South. Expenditures are high in these countries primarily because of donor-funded emergency employment programmes, food aid, and subsidies. In Ethiopia, expenditure on food aid reached 6 per cent of GDP in some drought years, prompting Ethiopia to introduce its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). The PSNP, which reached about 8 million people, or 12 per cent of the population, entails public work programmes for people who can work, ‘livelihood packages’ to help people develop non-agricultural income-generating activities, and cash or food for people who are unable to work (Devereux and White 2010: 66–68).
The picture that emerges from Weigand and Grosh is only somewhat distorted by their selection of countries. The countries for which they have complete or almost complete data include (in addition to the five cases above) Senegal, Madagascar, Benin, Botswana, and Burkina Faso, as well as Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia in North Africa. Detailed data are unsurprisingly unavailable or unreliable for countries with very weak states and low spending. However, omissions from Weigand and Grosh’s set include a number of countries that spend heavily on education (such as Kenya, Namibia, and Lesotho). They also underestimate expenditure in at least one important case – South Africa. In addition to spending almost 4 per cent of GDP on social assistance and about 1 per cent on social insurance, a much larger share (about 6 per cent) is spent on what might best be called ‘semi-social’ insurance (because many workers are required by law, indirectly, to join contributory, employment-linked, but privately run insurance schemes which serve the same function as social insurance in many other middle-income economies). If this is included, then a total of almost 20 per cent of GDP is spent on the welfare ‘state’ in South Africa.
By comparison, social spending in Britain passed 10 per cent of GDP only in the 1930s, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and it was only after the Second World War that spending accelerated above the levels observed in many African countries today (Lindert 2004). In other words, public social expenditure across large parts of Africa is now comparable with public expenditures in Britain after about 50 years of welfare state-building there.
The Weigand and Grosh data on relative expenditure on social insurance and social assistance reveals that African welfare states have developed in a distinctive direction, rather than not at all. Figure 24.1 shows social insurance and social assistance spending as a percentage of GDP for a small number of countries,1 together with a stylized version of the relative development of these categories of expenditure in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East/North Africa, Latin America, and Central/Eastern Europe. Whereas the Latin American and Central/Eastern European cases developed primarily through social insurance, the South Asian and African cases emphasized spending on social assistance. The Middle East/North African cases lay in between.
Source: Constructed by the author using data from Weigand and Grosh 2008, and author’s data on South Africa.
The Origins of Social Policy and its Post-War Eclipse by ‘Development’
Not only do a significant number of African countries spend a substantial share of national income on public health, education, and social welfare programmes, but in some cases they have been doing so for a long time. British colonies in South Africa and Mauritius had poor laws, based on British precedents from the nineteenth century. The programmes associated with the ‘modern’ welfare state were first introduced in South Africa itself, where non-contributory, means-tested old-age pensions were introduced in 1927–28 for elderly people classified as ‘white’ or ‘coloured’. Despite a conservative church-led backlash, programmatic provision was extended to the disabled, poor mothers with children, and the unemployed. By the late 1930s, South Africa had a well-developed welfare state for its white and coloured citizens. One sociologist exaggerated only somewhat when he proclaimed in 1937 that ‘provision for [the] European population … is scarcely less complete than that of Great Britain’ (Gray 1937: 270). Similar non-contributory old-age pensions were introduced for white residents in Southwest Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The construction of welfare states in these settler societies reflected a combination of elite ideology (which simultaneously entailed both racist and progressive elements) and democratic politics (within the enfranchised white and coloured population) (Seekings 2007, 2008).
Whilst part of the motivation for these schemes was to uphold a racial income hierarchy, old-age pensions were later extended to African people: in South Africa in 1944 and in Namibia in 1973 (but not in Southern Rhodesia). African people were initially excluded on the flawed grounds that ‘traditional’ systems of informal reciprocity protected them from poverty. The extension of pensions to African people in South Africa was driven by a combination of relatively progressive ideology (during the atypical circumstances of the Second World War) and recognition by both administrators and employers that rural poverty was pervasive and consequential (Seekings 2005). In Namibia, it has been suggested that the extension of coverage to vote-less African people was probably an attempt by the authoritarian regime to buy their quiescence and to improve the image of the South African army of occupation (Devereux 2007: 547–49).
South Africa was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to extend social assistance programmes to the non-voting poor. Soon after, Mauritius followed suit. Serious consideration was given to social insurance and social assistance in colonial Mauritius from the late 1930s, and non-contributory old-age pensions were finally introduced in 1950. The impetus in Mauritius initially came from colonial officials’ modernizing ideology and concern with poverty within the Indo-Mauritian population, but combined with pressure from Indo-Mauritian workers (especially through riots in 1937 and 1943) and from the emerging Indo-Mauritian political elite, which itself embraced social democratic ideas. The colonial government dragged its heels for more than a decade, however, and it was only when substantial powers were transferred to a legislature elected with a broad franchise that pensions were finally introduced (Seekings 2011).
In the early 1940s it briefly seemed that reforms of these sorts might be introduced on a wide scale across British colonies and dominions. The word ‘welfare’ had been inserted into British colonial legislation in the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which promised metropolitan funds for ill-defined categories of social and economic expenditure in the colonies. Debates over the 1941 Atlantic Charter fuelled concern with the welfare of colonial populations. At the end of 1942, the publication in London of the Beveridge Report ‘stirred public opinion’ in a number of colonies, resulting in ‘a considerable and growing interest … in the question of social security or social insurance’ (in the words of an anxious Colonial Officer). Faced with the suggestion that British colonial subjects should qualify for the kinds of programmes being promised to the citizenry in Britain itself, the Colonial Office quickly moved to ward off reforms. It advised colonial governments that the ‘more sophisticated forms of social insurance’ were appropriate only in the ‘more advanced’, wage-earning economies. In societies ‘in early stages of development’, redistributive obligations were seen as generally still accepted by ‘the tribal or family group’, or the ‘self-contained rural community’. In such cases, therefore, according to the colonial office ‘the first consideration should be to support, for the time being at least, the existing social structure which ensures this traditional provision’. The most pressing priorities in rural areas were measures to stabilize the prices received for agricultural produce, and other interventions to develop agriculture and thereby ‘raise the general standard of living’. These were seen as potentially needing to be supplemented by basic public health and education facilities, but not by the ‘more sophisticated’ kinds of welfare programme (all quotes from colonial archives cited in Seekings 2010a).
The new policy formed a core pillar of post-war British colonial strategy. Most colonies should be ‘developed’ economically, through the deployment of agricultural officers, experts in soil conservation and human nutrition, and public health and education advisers (Cooper 1997). Social order in rural and urban societies was to be upheld through the deployment of social welfare officers (Lewis 2000; Fourchard 2006). Expensive poverty-relief programmes were considered neither desirable nor feasible (e.g. Eckert 2004). A clear distinction came to be drawn between the colonies, which would be developed by what were in practice (rather ineffective) ‘developmental states’, focused primarily on agricultural development, and Britain itself, which would have a ‘welfare state’.
The origins of public social welfare policies in Africa thus lay in the replication of aspects of the British model, and the limits to this replication reflected, above all, the British Colonial Office’s insistence that British colonies in Africa required a very different, and less expensive, developmental model. Only in exceptional cases – South Africa, Mauritius – did welfare state-building begin. In these cases and only in these, the first reforms were driven by combinations of reformist elites and enfranchised citizens. A broadly similar process seems to have begun in French Africa, where family benefits were introduced in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco in the 1940s (Gruat 1990: 405).
Social welfare policies in Africa contrasted starkly with the situation across much of Latin America. By the late 1940s in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, large numbers of formal sector workers were covered by contributory social insurance schemes, protecting workers against the risks of poor health, disability, and old age. The different trajectories of welfare state-building on the two sides of the Atlantic reflected sharp economic, social, and political differences. In the major economies of Latin America, urban workers in the early twentieth century were mostly European immigrants without supportive roots or kin in the countryside. They also brought with them radical political traditions. In the face of urban militancy, Latin American elites sought to incorporate urban workers through corporatist institutions. In Africa, in contrast, not only were cities smaller, but most urban workers (even on the South African Witwatersrand or the Zambian Copperbelt) had close connections to the rural hinterland, and their militancy was more often channelled into anti-colonial, nationalist, or even millenarian struggles. Colonial elites in Africa sought political stability primarily through indirect rule, anchored in the countryside.
The Slow Expansion of Social Spending in Post-War Africa
In practice, the late colonial state was soon forced to introduce very selective social insurance programmes or their equivalent in an attempt to buy the quiescence of African workers in formal employment, primarily in the public sector (Cooper 1996). The International Labour Organization (ILO) pushed for reforms in ‘dependent territories’ (or colonies), as well as independent states in a 1944 ‘Recommendation’, followed by a 1952 Convention, on ‘minimum standards’ on social welfare programmes. It also facilitated a series of Africa-wide conferences on labour and welfare policies. These initiatives encouraged both the British and French to introduce statutory programmes. Contributory programmes of family and maternity benefits were introduced in most French colonies in the mid-1950s. Most of the North African countries introduced contributory programmes protecting against old age and sickness. In the 1960s, after achieving independence, the major former British colonies introduced contributory provident funds, through which formal sector workers were required to save for their retirement (or unemployment) – but on terms that presumed that they might return to rural villages and prefer lump-sum payments rather than monthly pensions, perhaps even prior to retirement age.
The new contributory programmes paid out benefits only to people who were members of and had previously contributed to these programmes. Except in North Africa, the coverage of these programmes thus remained very limited – generally to public-sector workers and small numbers of workers in formal employment in large private firms. In Egypt and Tunisia, by the 1980s, more than one-fifth of the population was covered. In sub-Saharan African countries, however, coverage was rarely above 10 per cent, and was often below 5 per cent. Welfare programmes entailed little redistribution or risk pooling. This was especially the case in the provident funds, which served as compulsory individualized savings institutions. Selected, privileged groups – notably the military and some other public employees – were often exempted from having to contribute to their pension schemes, so that welfare programmes sometimes served to redistribute upwards to privileged groups, as was the case in many other parts of the world (Paukert 1968).
Social insurance programmes in Africa ‘have always been too exclusive and inadequate for the needs of the continent’s people’ (Butare and Kaseke 2003: 3). Not only did coverage rarely extend beyond workers in formal employment (and their immediate dependents) in a continent where formal employment was scarce, but also, few post-colonial states had the reach or capacity to ensure that even workers in formal employment and their employers made the required contributions. By the 1970s, the ILO itself was retreating from its prioritization of contributory welfare programmes, focusing instead on meeting ‘basic needs’ through ‘development’.
After independence, across most of Africa the priorities for social policy and expenditure were education and health, with dramatic consequences in some cases. In Tanzania, less than one-half of lower primary school-age children and less than one in 10 of the higher primary school-age children were enrolled in school. Few children completed more than four years of schooling, and a negligible proportion reached secondary school. The new government initially prioritized the expansion of secondary schooling (and the establishment of the University of Dar es Salaam), but after 1967 reverted to an emphasis on practical, primary education. ‘Education for Self-Reliance’– instilling the new political philosophy of collective responsibility and social commitment – was an integral part of the strategy of ‘socialism and self-reliance’. The number of pupils entering primary school tripled in a decade, as did the (lower) number of pupils completing primary school. In 1969 the government announced its intention to achieve universal primary education within 20 years. Rapid gains soon prompted the government to bring the target date forward from 1989 to 1977. Spending on education doubled as a share of GDP in a decade (Coulson 1982; Buchert 1994).
Similarly, in Botswana only half of primary school-age children were enrolled in school, and very few progressed to secondary school at independence in 1966. In the 1970s, the government invested heavily in primary schooling with donors’ support. Primary school fees were reduced and then, in 1980, abolished. Investment was redirected to secondary schooling in the 1980s. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of primary schools more than doubled, whilst the number of secondary schools rose ten-fold. In many countries, slow improvements in public health services also contributed to dramatic improvements in health outcomes. In Botswana, child immunization rates rose from almost zero in the 1960s to 78 per cent in 1990. Infant mortality declined and life expectancy rose – from 46 years in 1965, to more than 62 years in 1990 (Duncan et al. 1997). Given that Botswana – and many other countries – achieved almost universal primary education as well as greatly improved health indicators in the 1980s, it is not surprising that Iliffe failed to recognize these dramatic changes in The African Poor, written at precisely this time.
Education and healthcare were integral to both modernizing elites’ developmental ambitions and the aspirations for upward social mobility and improved economic opportunities of ordinary people. In the 1970s and 1980s, social welfare programmes generally expanded much more modestly. Most former British colonies converted their provident funds into risk-pooling social insurance institutions, but there were dramatic changes in coverage or expenditure in few countries. The two exceptions were Mauritius and South Africa, which continued to be pioneers of welfare state-building in Africa. Mauritius extended its non-contributory social assistance programmes (introducing family allowances) in 1962, and in the late 1970s introduced a comprehensive ‘social security’ system combining social assistance and contributory social insurance.
Mauritius was an overwhelmingly commodified economy, with limited possibilities for subsistence agriculture. Demographic pressures (including rising numbers of elderly people), strong economic growth, and sustained electoral competition provided both incentives and resources for reform. Close links to progressive policy advisers in the UK helped to steer welfare state-building in Mauritius along much the same trajectory as the UK.
South Africa, under apartheid, invested heavily in the 1950s and 1960s in public education for the white population. Thereafter white people provided for their own retirement and illness primarily through the market (with privately administered pension and medical aid funds), whilst the state began to divert public expenditures to the education, healthcare, and welfare of the poor, black population. By the end of apartheid education was almost universal up to the age of 16, and about one in every two children completed secondary school. Racial discrimination in old-age pensions and other social assistance programmes was reduced and then abolished, with benefits being paid at a much more generous level than anywhere else in the global South. Progressive income taxes and pro-poor public expenditure meant that, even prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, there was substantial redistribution of income from rich to poor (Seekings and Nattrass 2005). The incentive was in part political (to contain domestic dissent and to deflect international criticism), but was not electoral, because the poor lacked the vote prior to 1994. There was also a developmental incentive to produce the skilled workers required by employers.
Social Change, Democratization, and Welfare State-Building in the Late Twentieth Century
A combination of socioeconomic and political changes provided further impetus for welfare state-building at the end of the twentieth century. The crucial socioeconomic change was de-agrarianization: rising populations and slow-growing (or stagnant) economies pushed people into rapidly growing towns and made it harder for kin to meet the social obligations recognized by earlier generations. At the same time, democratization in many countries, together with changing preferences among international agencies and donors, generated incentives for political elites to introduce policy reforms (Lindberg, this volume).
The impact of social change is evident across much of West, East, and Southern Africa. In many parts of Africa, people now acknowledge obligations to a much narrower range of kin than in the past – for example parents, but not aunts or uncles – and even obligations to close kin are conditional and negotiable. These changes are most obvious in urban areas, but affect rural areas also. In Eastern and Southern Africa, social and cultural change has been accelerated by HIV/AIDS and unemployment, which have raised dependency rates.
At the same time, a range of international agencies have diversified their emphasis away from only ‘developmental’ interventions to cover ‘welfare’ programmes also, in what has been called a ‘new model of development’ (Hanlon et al. 2010). The World Bank began enthusiastically to promote ‘conditional cash transfers’, along the lines of the bolsa família in Brazil, which provides cash grants to poor families with children on the condition that the children attend school and visit a health clinic. In conferences it promoted conditional cash transfers not only in countries such as Kenya or Malawi, but also in post-war Angola and Sierra Leone.2 The ILO also recognized the limited reach of contributory programmes of social insurance and began to endorse non-contributory programmes for the poor. The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) put additional pressure on international agencies and African governments. The World Bank assessed that social policies were central not only to the first MDG, on poverty reduction, but also to MDG 2 (universal primary education), 3 (gender equality in education), and 4 through 6 (health): ‘without appropriate social protection mechanisms the MDG targets for 2015 will not be achieved’ (World Bank 2003: 3). Relevant policies included old-age and disability pensions, unemployment benefits, safety nets, transfers targeted to children or youth, social funds, and public employment programmes, social insurance programmes that protect poor households from shocks, and targeted (and conditional) social assistance. The shifting discourses of public policy are reflected in policy positions adopted by the African Union (AU) and Southern African Development Community (Wright and Noble 2010).
In practice, policy innovations have been inhibited by concerns, within both international organizations and national states, over both affordability and desirability. The World Bank equivocates on the import of affordability, suggesting that ‘even in the poorest of countries, safety net programs have a role to play’, at the same time as acknowledging ‘major problems of affordability and administrative feasibility’ (World Bank 2001: 36). Its enthusiasm for social protection was limited by its insistence that these be seen as developmental. Social protection programmes should not be viewed as ‘relief or welfare handouts, but rather investments that prevent irreversible human development losses by the poor, thereby protecting their future productivity’ (ibid.). In developmental terms, the elderly are a lesser priority than children (Kakwani and Subbarao 2005).
This wariness of ‘welfare states’ has been widely shared among African political elites. The Mozambican minister of women’s affairs and social welfare called for reductions in the value of (already modest) cash grants to the elderly because the government should not be giving ‘alms’ to the poor (Hanlon et al. 2010: 7). In Ethiopia, the government promoted the PSNP based on employment on public works, rather than conditional cash transfers because of a concern with an ‘entitlement culture’ (Devereux and White 2010: 67). In South Africa, most (but not all) of the leadership of the governing African National Congress (ANC) condemn ‘handouts’ and endorse instead ‘developmental’ social policies and self-reliance (Seekings and Matisonn 2012). Devereux and White conclude that ‘political elites across Africa exhibit a striking bias in favour of the economically active poor, who are considered “deserving,” and a fear, despite evidence to the contrary, that “handouts” create “dependency”‘(Devereux and White 2010: 63). Elites worry that grants are spent on alcohol, or that there is fraud, or that they allow children to renege on their responsibilities to their parents (Devereux 2007: 559).
There is little good evidence on what African people themselves think. In South Africa, where most social assistance programmes are old, have broad coverage, and are often taken for granted, public opinion favours the extension of social assistance, but not unconditionally. The poor say that the government should support poor people, but when faced with specific questions about precisely who they consider deserving, rich and poor alike oppose the government providing financial support for people who are poor as a result of their own behaviour (for example, because they lost their jobs due to drinking or theft). However, the public are more generous than elites in their identification of who is deserving, though their generosity is not universal (Seekings 2010b). Surrender et al. (2010) found no evidence that receiving a grant does deter people from work or inculcate dependent attitudes. South Africa’s disability grants provide a telling case study. In the face of high rates of AIDS, many doctors and nurses certified that their HIV-positive patients were unable to work, allowing them to claim the generous disability grant. The government baulked at the cost and sought reforms to prevent claims from patients whose health was improving due to antiretroviral treatment. Getting cooperation from medical professionals and grant administrators, however, was no easy task and the number of grants paid did not drop by much (Nattrass 2006).
A range of countries did introduce major reforms in the last part of the twentieth century. Southern African countries, especially, expanded existing programmes or replicated their neighbours and introduced new ones. South Africa’s first democratic government inherited non-contributory old-age pensions and other programmes and a partial system of semi-social insurance for better-paid workers in formal employment. In the late 1990s, in the context of necessary fiscal austerity, the government focused on making its social expenditures more ‘developmental’. In the 2000s, however, expenditure rose significantly. The total number of grants paid monthly rose from less than 3 million in 2000, to more than 14 million by 2010 – in a country with a total population of fewer than 50 million people. Expenditure on social assistance rose from 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent. The increased numbers and expenditure reflected primarily the expansion of child support grants, which entail modest benefits to poor parents supposedly for the support of their children. The governing ANC has won a majority of the national vote in every election since 1994, but threats from opposition parties (including in 2009 a party that had broken away from the ANC) provided some incentive for the ANC to expand grants, and thereby reduce poverty rates. Reforms were accelerated also by litigation, with a series of cases contesting whether the exclusion of various categories of beneficiaries accorded with South Africa’s progressive constitution (Seekings and Matisonn 2012).
In 1992 the new, democratically elected government of independent Namibia ended racial discrimination in benefits, but set benefits at a much lower level than in neighbouring South Africa. In 1999 the value of the pension became an electoral issue, with opposition parties pressing strongly for a big increase. Botswana’s Democratic Party government introduced old-age pensions in 1996 soon after it failed to win a majority of the vote in the 1994 elections, although it did win a majority of seats. The introduction of old-age pensions in Lesotho in 2004–05 – and a subsequent increase in their value – also reflected electoral politics. In Swaziland, old-age pensions were introduced in 2005, not in response to electoral competition, but in the face of strong lobbying by civil society organizations (Pelham 2007: 4; Devereux and White 2010: 70–72; Devereux 2010).
There is evidence also of the role of electoral competition in driving the expansion of public education. In the Ugandan presidential campaign in 1996, the incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, promised to abolish primary school fees for up to four children per family. He had previously resisted calls for the abolition of fees, but slipped the promise as a minor item in his manifesto. When it proved popular, he adopted it as a central plank in his campaign. Although his re-election was likely, the predicted margin of victory was uncomfortably small. Museveni ended up winning comfortably and then honoured his election promise. As one Ministry of Finance official told Stasavage, ‘we won the election because of the [free education] pledge, so we have to come up with the money for it’ (Stasavage 2005a: 61). Stasavage argues that the school fee reform was especially attractive to Museveni because he wanted to expand his support outside of specific regions and the reform was an issue of country-wide appeal. In the following 2001 election, Museveni emphasized his record on primary education, and data from a 2000 survey of public opinion in Uganda suggest that voters rated his performance best with respect to education.
Using time series cross-sectional data on 44 countries between 1980 and 1996, Stasavage (2005b) shows that the Ugandan case was not exceptional. Multi-party competition is associated with increased spending on education, especially on primary education. This finding is consistent with the results of similar studies in Latin America and elsewhere. Stasavage finds an overall effect despite the fact that multi-party competition seems to have a muted effect on education spending in some African countries (such as Malawi) where parties have sharply defined regional bases and hence a reduced incentive to implement country-wide programmes.
Competitive elections are not always an incentive to programmatic reform, as the Zimbabwean case illustrates. Like South Africa and Namibia, Zimbabwe inherited at independence an Old Age Pension Act. Unlike its neighbours, however, the legislation was racially exclusive. Rather than introducing equal benefits for black Zimbabweans, the new government decided to repeal the Act. Very limited assistance was later provided for the elderly and disabled under a Social Welfare Assistance Act, passed in 1988 (Kaseke 2002). Both rhetorically and in practice, the government emphasized land reform. Even when other countries in the region introduced old-age pensions, and even in the face of strong electoral competition within Zimbabwe, the government did not introduce programmatic welfare reforms for the general population. The government did, however, introduce pensions for one specific group of beneficiaries: veterans of the independence war. In 1992, disgruntled war veterans demanded both land and welfare benefits. When President Mugabe conceded discretionary lump-sum payments for ‘disabled’ war veterans, the Veterans Association leadership rubber-stamped applications without any medical examinations, and later began to count supposed post-traumatic stress as disability. In the face of further protests, Mugabe conceded a lump-sum payment and monthly pensions to all veterans, as well as healthcare and education benefits, and a share of land expropriated from white farmers. In the Zimbabwean case, the state’s strained resources were allocated to providing patronage to a special interest group – war veterans – rather than clear programmatic benefits to the poor.
Incumbent elites seeking to maintain semi-discretionary control over patronage have been one source of opposition to reforms. Another source of opposition are international agencies and donors, whose enthusiasm for reforms proved to be uneven. In Lesotho, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) opposed the introduction of old-age pensions on the grounds that the pensions were unaffordable (Devereux and White 2010: 65). In Ethiopia, also, the government established the PSNP in the face of opposition from some donors. Donors initially supported the proposal to move beyond emergency food aid, but then shifted to a more critical position, primarily on account of scepticism about the state’s capacity to implement a national public works programme. Donors promoted conditional cash transfers instead (ibid.: 67). In these cases, domestic political considerations overrode donor influence.
In other cases, however, donors have driven reforms. ‘In the majority of African countries’, Devereux argues, ‘social protection has been, and remains, a donor-led agenda’ (Devereux 2010: 12). Donors and international organizations vigorously promoted cash transfer programmes, including through ‘providing technical assistance and direct financing to the design, implementation and evaluation of pilot projects and national programmes, building the capacity of government ministries, and even lobbying Parliamentarians’ (ibid.). In Mozambique, the ILO and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) together proposed a conditional cash transfer, called the Minimum Income on School Attendance (MISA) programme. The proposal was incorporated into Mozambican government documents in 2002 and a pilot project was initiated (Lavinas 2003). In Malawi, food and cash transfer schemes were designed and implemented by an international non-governmental organization (NGO) with funding from bilateral Irish and British donors. In Malawi, and Zambia also, the government itself prioritized subsidies for agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, and tolerated rather than embraced donor-driven welfare experiments (Devereux and White 2010; Devereux 2010).
Africa does not warrant its neglect in the comparative scholarship on welfare states. Recent studies of the comparative politics and political economy of welfare provision draw their case studies from Latin America, South and East Asia, and post-communist Eastern Europe (e.g. Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Rudra 2008), whilst studies that encompass Africa (such as Gough et al. 2004) tend to emphasize the lack of public provision across most of Africa, or even the ways in which predatory states undermine the wellbeing of citizens. Yet many states in Africa spend a considerable share of national resources on public education, poverty alleviation and, to a lesser extent, public health. Social insurance programmes are limited across much of Africa (with North Africa being the conspicuous exception), reflecting primarily the limits to formal employment. However, the limits to social insurance do not mean that there are no programmes for maintaining incomes. Indeed, the data of Weigand and Grosh suggest that Africa spends a larger share of GDP on social assistance than any other region in the global South.
The construction of welfare states in Africa has entailed three broad phases. In the first period, the settler societies of Southern Africa and the island colony of Mauritius pioneered public welfare provision, borrowing from the British model. Faced with growing interest in other colonies, the British Colonial Office firmly discouraged further replication of the British model, emphasizing instead rural ‘development’. In the second period, from the 1950s, the late colonial and then post-colonial states began to invest more heavily, expanding public primary education and initiating contributory welfare programmes for selected formal sector workers. These efforts accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. A third period coincided with, and was to some extent due to, the wave of democratization across Africa from the 1980s. States expanded both the reach of and spending on public education, and introduced new cash transfer (and related) programmes to mitigate poverty.
The politics of reform varied across these three periods, although in each case reforms reflected the interaction of domestic and international factors. In the first period, domestic political elites drew on ideas from Britain, introducing reforms that placated selected groups of voters or complied with their modernist and (selectively) progressive ideologies. The limits of reform in this period were imposed by generally hostile colonial authorities. In the second period, domestic political elites, encouraged by international agencies, sought to use social policy to ‘modernize’ their societies and contribute to the ‘development’ of their economies. In this phase, the stimulus to elite action seems to have lain in the prevailing ideologies of modernization, whether dressed up in more ‘socialist’ or more ‘capitalist’ garb. The limits to reform were set by the weakness of domestic political pressures for reform. In the third phase, the impetus to reform came from foreign donors, on the one hand, and groups of domestic voters, on the other. In this period, domestic elites were generally uncertain about welfare reforms, embracing them only if they seemed ‘developmental’.
Few African countries have, until recently, had strong interest groups pushing for program-matic interventions. Even in post-apartheid South Africa, where trade unions use their considerable institutional and political power to protect their interests with regard to wages, conditions of employment, and pensions and medical benefits, they have rarely made social policy reforms their priority. Elections, however, do matter; although experience suggests that electoral competition is neither necessary nor sufficient for programmatic reform. Incumbent elites can choose to contest politics through dispensing patronage, whether narrowly to specific interest groups, or more broadly. It is possible that elections matter more in specific circumstances. Research in Brazil suggests that the diffusion of bolsa família between municipalities in Brazil was driven in part by the intensity of competition between the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party and the left-wing Workers’ Party. When elections pitted left-wing against right-wing parties, there was little impetus to build support through commitments to pro-grammatic welfare reforms. In Africa, it is likely that welfare reforms are especially appealing when incumbent parties feel they need to install a safety net to mitigate the risks associated with drastic economic adjustments or chronic drought. Moreover, electoral competition remains muted across much of the continent (van de Walle, this volume).
Notes
1SA1 and SA2 mark South Africa, depending on how one categorizes semi-social insurance expenditures.
2Third International Conference on Conditional Cash Transfers, Istanbul, Turkey, 26–30 June 2006.
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