COVID-19 draws lessons for the future of social protection

Food security experts in South Africa warned early on that the lockdown instituted to manage the spread of COVID-19 would threaten children’s nutrition. Before the pandemic hit, a third of South Africa’s 20 million children were already living in households below the food poverty line.

The lockdown has pushed many more into food insecurity and hunger. The food crisis was not about a national food shortage or distribution failure – stores remained open and there was food on the shelves.

Rather, it was a poverty crisis, exacerbated by the loss of employment income for households. It took a few months before the impact on households and children could be quantified.

The first round of a National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS-CRAM) found massive job losses: around 3 million fewer people were employed in April than in February. Two million of those who lost their jobs were women.

Almost half of those polled said their household ran out of money to buy food in April, and 15% of those living in households with children said they were hungry. This was the case even though most of these households received at least one child support allowance.

The food security of more than 9 million children was further compromised when schools closed and the school feeding program ceased to operate. This put more strain on the resources of caregivers who had to replace lost meals.

In a pernicious turn, food prices have also increased dramatically.

Insufficient social protection program

South Africa’s extensive social grants program transfers nearly $ 18 million in grants to low-income and vulnerable people every month. Analyzes of the status quo before the lockdown showed that the child support allowance was well targeted to households most vulnerable to the effects of the lockdown, including 80% of people in informal worker households.

Child support is the most pro-poor of all grants because of its low means test. It also has the widest reach, being paid to over 7 million caregivers to help support nearly 13 million children. But it has not been able to protect children and their households from shocks.

COVID-19 has amplified the inequalities and vulnerabilities that already existed and called attention to the gaping holes in the safety net. These included the fact that child support – R440 per month in 2020, around US $ 70 in purchasing power parity – was not enough to provide for a child’s nutritional needs.

The crisis also highlighted the total absence of social allowances for working-age adults (unless they were disabled), regardless of the structural conditions that affect their lives.

There was temporary relief in the form of a disaster relief program. It included an R300 top-up to child support for only one month and R250 top-ups to other existing grants for six months. It also included a new caregiver allowance of Rand 500 for five months and a COVID-19 distress social assistance allowance of Rand 350 per month for working-age adults who were unemployed and not receiving any other grants.

The disaster relief subsidy package was to last until October 2020. The October medium-term fiscal policy statement included provisions for extending social assistance in times of distress, and a new one. extension was announced by the president in February.

But there were gaps. The top-up subsidies were not extended after October, nor was the subsidy for informal caregivers. Caregivers who received maintenance allowance for their children were not allowed to apply for social assistance allowance for distress.

United Nations human rights bodies have advised families with children to be prioritized in material relief programs. Yet there is no disaster relief for caregivers. There is no allowance for them in the child support grant and there is no recourse to the COVID-19 grant if the caregiver is unemployed.

It is an impossible and punitive paradox for caregivers of working age, the vast majority of whom are women.

Women were overrepresented among those who lost their jobs or were taken on leave in 2020. They were also underrepresented in the support mechanisms in place for employees who lost their jobs because they were less likely than men to lose their jobs. ‘be employed in the formal sector initially.

Yet the distress welfare allowance was disproportionately received by men, precisely because women who received children’s grants could not apply.

The same rule does not apply to elderly carers who receive the scholarship for the elderly. Almost a million retirees also receive child support. The system recognizes that the elderly caregiver and child both need income support – they cannot be expected to share a single grant.

Childhood hunger and malnutrition

The authors of the South African Child Gauge 2020 describe the invisible, cumulative and devastating effects of chronic malnutrition as a form of ‘slow violence’. Poor nutrition slows children’s growth and reduces their chances in life.

A quarter of children under five are too short for their age due to chronic undernutrition. This number has not changed much over the past two decades. Despite its broad reach, small child support has not been able to reduce the persistently high rates of stunting.

The National Income Dynamics Survey tracked measures of hunger among adults and children in 2020. The trend is clear: There was a dramatic increase in hunger in the first months of the lockdown, which was attenuated to some extent in July and August. But after the supplements and the caregiver subsidy ended, those improvements were reversed. Child hunger has increased despite looser lockdown regulations and some improvement in employment figures.

What’s needed

Since grant adjustments over the past year have occurred in the context of an urgent disaster response, little time remains for a systematic process of exploring policy options. There is no indication that the proposed adjustments were subject to a gender or child impact assessment before decisions were made.

It is time to move from one-off, temporary and insufficient disaster relief to adequate social protection for all.

One of the strengths of child support is that it is legislated as a permanent subsidy in ordinary times, not just in times of disaster, and therefore cannot be removed. The COVID-19 Social Assistance in Distress Grant is a temporary grant for disaster relief. It can be reduced or stopped at any time, as happened with the caregiver grant.

There are three recommendations that flow from this:

• The government must invest in increasing child support.

• The COVID-19 distress social assistance allowance is to be transformed into a permanent income support allowance (provided by law) for adults.

• The income support subsidy should be made available to unemployed caregivers, including those receiving child support.

From a child health and development perspective, an increase in the value of the child support allowance is essential – if not at the level of other subsidies, at least at the food poverty line as a benchmark. minimal. This needs to be complemented by programs to support the nutrition and mental health of pregnant women, and by improvements in service delivery to ensure early use of the Child Support Grant.

Tackling the persistent burden of malnutrition is an urgent imperative. It will be costly in the short term, but failure to do so will be too costly for the children, their families and the country in the long term.

The budget announcement will contain important clues about the direction of the government’s investments. Children and the women who care for them can no longer be told to tighten their belts.

Katharine Hall has already received funding from the NRF.

By Katharine Hall, Principal Investigator, Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town