Stephen Devereux4 and Anna Wolkenhauer5
This article unpacks the expanding social protection agenda, in which promotive objectives have been added to the original welfarist or safety net aim of protection. It draws out the resulting tensions, potentials and limits, to inform a discussion of where African social protection is and is headed. After tracing several initial drivers of social assistance in Africa – structural adjustment, food insecurity and famines, HIV and AIDS, and conflict – it shows how promotive effects were increasingly advocated along three pathways: investment of social transfers, building human capital, and linking social with economic support. International development agencies added their own priorities to this agenda, drawing on evidence of promotive impacts to convince national governments. Drawing on Zambia’s experience, we conclude that, while the expanded agenda redirects attention to questions of economic development, its transformative potential remains limited due to a persistent focus on the micro-level and a failure to build effective linkages to other sectors.
Promotive and protective social protection, cash plus, international development agencies, policy diffusion, Zambia.
The spread of social protection policies and programmes across the global South over the past 20-plus years has been accompanied by an unresolved question: Is social protection primarily concerned with ensuring that basic consumption needs are met for all people at all times, or can it instigate developmental processes and sustainable poverty reduction through productivity enhancement and economic growth? The preference among many international agencies and national governments for ‘productive safety nets’ and ‘graduation programmes’ suggests the latter. But how ‘developmental’ can these micro-level interventions be? And what roles should international organisations and national governments play?
The definitional and operational debate between ‘protective’ and ‘promotive’ functions surfaced even before the emergence of social protection as a development policy agenda in the late 1990s. In Hunger and Public Action, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (1989: 16) distinguished between
two different aspects of social security,6 viz. protection and promotion. The former is concerned with the task of preventing a decline in living standards […] The latter refers to the enhancement of general living standards.
Guhan (1994) added a third function for social protection – prevention – to avert deprivation through risk management mechanisms such as insurance, and Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004) added a fourth – transformation – to address the social and structural drivers of poverty and vulnerability, such as discrimination.
Social protection systems have two foundational pillars – social assistance and social insurance – but in the global South, the surge in social protection since the late 1990s focused mainly on the former. We argue that the initial drivers of social protection in the global South were protective, as the term implies. The primary objective was to ensure the provision at all times of the subsistence needs of poor and vulnerable people who are uninsured against shocks.
Critics characterise contemporary applications of social protection as a narrow, palliative, and residual form of social policy (Adésínà 2015; Aina 2021). Programmes such as cash transfers are unfavourably compared to post-independence social policy interventions, which were integrally linked to economic reforms and the productive capacity of nations and peoples (Adésínà 2009). Mkandawire (2010) argues that for social protection to become socially and economically transformational, it must be better articulated with other social and economic policies, since development requires a multisectoral approach.
Thinking about the state of social protection and its future trajectory from this more holistic perspective requires examining the tension between its protective and promotive functions, conceptually and operationally. Section 2 identifies four drivers of social protection as a protective policy agenda. In Section 3, we explore pathways and instruments for ‘promotive’ social protection. Section 4 problematises the role of international development agencies in advocating for different approaches to social protection. After drawing lessons from Zambia in Section 5, Section 6 concludes by arguing that achieving social protection’s potential to move beyond residual poverty alleviation requires more concerted efforts towards linking social and economic policies, and that this task should be led by national states, supported by international agencies.
Social protection emerged in the global South as a welfarist policy response to a series of threats to human wellbeing in the late twentieth century. One of these threats was structural adjustment programmes, which exacerbated poverty by removing state subsidies on food and agricultural inputs and imposing user fees on education and health care. This ‘Washington Consensus’ thinking, led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, minimised the role of the state in the economy and reified private sector actors, but the effect was to exclude the poorest from accessing essential services (see Simms 2000 for an example from Zambia).
Protective measures were introduced in many countries, such as Ghana’s ‘Programme of Actions to Mitigate the Social Costs of Adjustment’ (PAMSCAD). Within the development agencies, UNICEF led the fightback with a book titled Adjustment with a Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth (Cornia, Jolly and Stewart 1987). In the 1990 World Development Report on poverty, ‘transfers and safety nets’ were the third in a three-pronged strategy, after ‘promoting economic opportunities for the poor’ and ‘delivering social services to the poor’ (World Bank 1990).
A second driver was food insecurity and famines, which triggered large-scale emergency food aid interventions in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan). Humanitarian relief is explicitly protective. However, the recurrence of these events prompted debates about ‘linking relief and development’ (Buchanan-Smith and Maxwell 1994), or how to move beyond reactive relief towards longer-term support that would build resilience and steadily reduce the need for emergency appeals.
In Ethiopia, this thinking resulted in the Employment Generation Scheme (EGS), a food-for-work programme that paid participants to work on rural infrastructure projects (e.g. soil and water conservation) that would reduce household and community vulnerability to climate-triggered food crises. The EGS evolved into the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), launched in Ethiopia in 2005. The paired objectives are evident in its name: a protective safety net embedded within promotive ambitions.
A third driver was HIV and AIDS, which decimated households through its ‘hollowing out’ effect – removing infected adults from the labour force and leaving widow(er)s and orphans behind. In Zambia, the Social Cash Transfer Pilot Project (SCTPP) was introduced under the umbrella of an AIDS mitigation programme in 2003. It targeted ‘critically poor and incapacitated households’, defined as those with low labour capacity (no workers, only ‘dependants’) that were unable to meet 80 per cent of their subsistence needs. Although the purpose of the cash transfers was explicitly stated as ‘buying basic necessities like food, soap’, even the earliest project reports emphasised that recipients invested some of the cash in their farms or micro-enterprises (Schubert 2005: 22).
The fourth driver was conflict. In Mozambique, for example, Gabinete de Apoio à População Vulnerável (GAPVU) was launched in 1990 as a cash transfer programme for urban residents who had been displaced by civil war from rural areas and were unable to make a viable livelihood in towns and cities. Target groups included households with malnourished children, older persons living alone, and persons with disability who were unable to work. Benefits were expected to be spent on food, with the goal of raising average consumption from 1,400 to 1,700 kilocalories per person per day (Datt et al. 1997). This programme was explicitly protective. No claims were made and no objectives were set for productive impacts.
Interestingly, the design and financing of all programmes mentioned in this section (PAMSCAD, PSNP, SCTPP, GAPVU) were dominated by international agencies. Clearly, the early social protection agenda was oriented towards protection, yet promotive aspirations were already evident. The following section explores how the two objectives became increasingly interconnected over time.
We identify three pathways for social protection to achieve promotive impacts: spontaneous investment of social cash transfers; induced linkages to social services; and explicit linkages to economic activities. In their advocacy to governments across the global South, development agencies made claims that social protection can reduce poverty sustainably, and produced evidence for all three pathways.
Investment of cash transfers in productive activities is a behavioural response that was not designed or even ‘nudged’. This pathway relies on recipients with liquidity constraints choosing to invest some of their cash in livelihood activities that generate incremental flows of income. Numerous evaluations found evidence that recipients use some transfer income as working capital for micro-enterprises or to finance job search behaviour (Samson et al. 2004). Even if cash transfers are entirely spent on consumption, they generate income and employment multipliers, an effect quantified by the ‘local economy-wide impact evaluation’ (LEWIE) methodology (Taylor 2012). In 2012, the World Bank reviewed the literature on ‘how social safety nets contribute to growth’ (Alderman and Yemtsov 2012: 1).
The second pathway is to build human capital, by linking social assistance recipients directly to social services. School feeding programmes and conditional cash transfers (CCTs), for instance, make receipt of food or cash conditional on children’s utilisation of education and health services. The theory of change is that well-nourished, healthier, and educated children will enter the labour market better equipped to earn decent livelihoods than their impoverished parents, thereby breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Numerous evaluations of school feeding and CCT programmes have found persuasive evidence for increased uptake of education and health services, but these services must be of good quality, and the labour market must be ready to absorb youth into decent employment when they leave education, which is not always the case (Ulrichs and Roelen 2012).
The third pathway comes through building explicit linkages from social protection to economic activity at the micro-level. Since small cash transfers alone cannot sustainably lift people out of poverty, agencies and governments often complement cash with other transfers and services, one aim being to ‘graduate’ recipients out of support. Under the ‘cash plus’ agenda, recipients receive cash, as well as training, agricultural inputs, or referral to services, to name a few (Roelen et al. 2017). Public works programmes combine cash or in-kind transfers with asset creation, such as soil conservation and micro-irrigation to support agricultural production. ‘Graduation model’ packages combine social assistance components (cash transfers) with livelihood promotion components (asset transfers, business training) to ‘graduate’ people out of extreme poverty. Though demonstrably successful when implemented as non-governmental organisation (NGO) projects in several countries (Banerjee et al. 2015), they are difficult for governments to run at scale because of their cost and complexity (Sabates-Wheeler et al. 2021).
Social protection instruments put these three pathways to the test with varying degrees of promotive intent. Unconditional cash transfers – child benefits, disability grants, social pensions – target non-working cohorts, and their aim is purely protective, to ensure a subsistence level of consumption. Nonetheless, as seen above, promotive outcomes are possible, through spending that generates multiplier effects and investment that generates additional income. Other instruments, notably conditional cash transfers and school feeding programmes, are designed with both protective and promotive intentions, delivering immediate social assistance while anticipating long-term economic returns by investing in the human capital of poor children. Finally, some social protection instruments – public works, graduation programmes – are overtly promotive. They target working adults with assistance that supports livelihoods and aims to make participants self-reliant.
Overall, different social protection instruments pursue different objectives to different degrees. The next section explores the approaches of selected international agencies towards these two overriding objectives.
For both ideological and strategic reasons, development agencies often chose to advocate for social protection as an economic investment (promotive) rather than as consumption support (protective) or a human right (a moral imperative, or government duty). But agencies were not consistent. One reason why many governments in the global South were slow or reluctant to adopt social protection was contradictory messages between agencies that held divergent ideological positions about what social protection should achieve, and how.
In one corner, agencies such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have consistently emphasised the promotion objective. The World Bank named their first social protection strategy From Safety Net to Springboard (World Bank 2001), while their second Social Protection and Labor Strategy emphasised linkages to employment (World Bank 2012). They prefer the residualist term ‘social safety nets’ to ‘social assistance’ – cf. For Protection and Promotion: The Design and Implementation of Effective Safety Nets (Grosh et al. 2008) and The State of Social Safety Nets (World Bank 2018). A recent publication on social protection in Zambia titled A Hand Up, Not a Hand-Out (World Bank 2022) epitomises this stance towards leveraging social assistance for promotive outcomes.
The FAO, which boarded the social protection bandwagon later than other agencies, ‘aims to promote linkages between social protection and agriculture, food security, nutrition, natural resource management, decent rural employment and resilience building’ (2017: xii). The FAO led a multi-country project called ‘From Protection to Production’ (PtoP), which researched the productive impacts of cash transfer programmes (FAO 2014). The FAO’s Social Protection Framework is sub-titled Promoting Rural Development for All (FAO 2017).
In the opposite corner are agencies such as UNICEF and the ILO, which favour welfarist or rights-based approaches. UNICEF’s Global Social Protection Programme Framework articulates its commitment to ‘a rights-based approach towards universal social protection’ and sees the objective as ‘preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion throughout their life-course’ (UNICEF 2019: 2).
The ILO’s Social Protection Floor Initiative, adopted as an ILO Recommendation by 185 member states of the International Labour Conference in 2012, requires governments to guarantee that all citizens and residents enjoy ‘basic income security […] at a nationally defined minimum level’ and access to essential services throughout their lives (ILO 2012). For UNICEF and ILO, the human right to social protection is pre-eminent; the potential productive impacts of social transfers are secondary.
The second reason why some development agencies emphasised the economic returns to social protection is strategic. Political economy analyses of social protection’s rapid adoption by dozens of countries across the global South debate the extent to which this policy diffusion process was nationally owned, co-constructed, or ‘donor-driven’. Books have been written arguing for each position: Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South (Hanlon, Barrientos and Hulme 2010); The Global Rise of Social Cash Transfers: How States and International Organizations Constructed a New Instrument for Combating Poverty (Leisering 2018); and The Expansion of Basic Social Protection in Low-Income Countries: An Analysis of Foreign Aid Actors’ Role in the Emergence of Social Transfers (Cherrier 2016; emphases in bold added).
The ‘donor-driven’ narrative is too simplistic, even though the proliferation of near-identical programmes and policies across the global South, following models promoted by international development agencies, suggests a policy diffusion process that was heavily influenced by a discourse originating from the global North. Agencies urged governments to implement social protection, using strategies that verged on the coercive (Devereux and Wolkenhauer 2021), but they did not force adoption. Domestic political forces interacting with carrots and sticks wielded by the international community resulted in the adoption (or rejection) of advice and advocacy for social protection (Hickey et al. 2020).
Nonetheless, development agencies often faced resistance from governments that did not accept the welfarist or rights-based arguments for social assistance, citing three reasons: their perceptions that social protection is wasteful expenditure on consumption rather than production, that free handouts cause ‘dependency syndrome’, and that social welfare is unaffordable in low-income countries (Handa et al. 2018).
Agencies therefore invested in making a case for social assistance having productive impacts, which addressed all three concerns. First, social protection expenditure was shown to generate economic returns. Second, to the extent that recipients invested their cash transfers in micro-enterprises, the risk of ‘dependency syndrome’ receded. Third, if cash transfers generate income multipliers or significantly enhance human capital, social protection will eventually pay for itself.
One example of an agency quantifying the economic returns to investments in social protection came from the UK Department for International Development (DFID),7 which commissioned ‘value for money’ studies on social transfer programmes (White, Hodges and Greenslade 2015). One objective was to demonstrate – to UK domestic constituencies as well as to governments in the global South – that social protection is a cost-effective tool for reducing poverty, in comparison to other investments of public funds.
Often the direction of social protection in a country was determined by an alliance between the most powerful government ministry (often the Ministry of Finance), and the most influential agency operating in the country (often the World Bank). Both these actors are looking for economic returns to their spending on social protection.
Sometimes agencies form alliances that appear to bridge the protective/promotive divide. One example is the FAO/UNICEF Transfer Project, that built on PtoP’s evidence generation on cash transfer impacts in eight African countries, in terms of both ‘social outcomes’, such as household food security and nutrition status, as well as ‘productive outcomes’, such as local income multipliers and agricultural growth (Davis et al. 2016: v).
A second example is a curious alliance announced in June 2015, when the World Bank and ILO co-signed the ‘Universal Social Protection Initiative’. Universal social protection was defined as ‘adequate cash transfers for all who need them’ – an uneasy compromise between ‘for all’ (the ILO’s universal, rights-based vision) and ‘who need them’ (the World Bank’s targeted, residual preference). The joint statement explained how this ‘shared mission’ served both agencies’ agendas: ‘Achieving universality would facilitate the delivery of the World Bank’s corporate goals of reducing poverty and increasing shared prosperity and the ILO’s mandate of promoting decent work and social protection for all’ (ILO and World Bank 2015: 3). The question is whether the two visions are complementary or, instead, contradict each other.
Instead of advocating social protection to low- and middle-income countries as rights-based social welfare systems, some agencies chose to frame it as a poverty reduction tool. There are two limitations to this claim. The first is that the benefits delivered by most social protection programmes in the global South are too low even to meet subsistence needs. South Africa’s relatively generous Child Support Grant, for instance, has not been sufficient to reduce child stunting below 25 per cent since its introduction in 1998 and subsequent expansion to reach two-thirds of all children in the country (Devereux, Jonah and May 2019). The second point is that social protection does not affect the structural conditions that generate and reproduce poverty, such as infrastructure deficits, weak markets, poor-quality essential services, limited employment opportunities, and governance failures.
Achieving poverty reduction through social protection is not simple, and success is never guaranteed. One case in point is Zambia, where the Social Cash Transfer (SCT) has been successfully scaled up from a small pilot in 2003 to reach around 1 million households in 2023. The productive effects of the SCT, such as recipients investing in agricultural assets, were politically important, as the government – especially the Ministry of Finance – needed to be convinced of the returns on ‘investing’ in social assistance (Quarles van Ufford et al. 2016; Wolkenhauer 2023). The measurable productive effects, however, remained at the micro-level, while the larger picture of economic diversification and employment creation did not fundamentally change. Hence, during research in 2023 by Anna Wolkenhauer, one question raised in the implementing ministry was where to graduate households after they left the SCT.
Graduation programmes have been criticised for moving people off social assistance lists with no protection against future shocks, but they could also be conceptualised as a transition from one form of social protection to another. An example in Zambia would be to support SCT recipients to form farming cooperatives and apply for the Farmer Input Support Programme, to scale up their farming activities. Another option would be to facilitate the movement of working-age SCT recipients from social assistance into employment that is linked to social insurance schemes. Policymakers would need to look beyond social protection in isolation, and instead view social and economic policies in tandem (Adésínà 2015). Different levels should also be considered. While social protection interventions are targeted at the micro-level (households and individuals), employment opportunities or access to markets necessitate coherence at the meso- and macro-levels. The social protection discourse in Zambia also provides ideas for how to move in this direction.
Having gained wide support from consecutive governments and having been scaled up to a significant level (with the aim to increase the caseload further in coming years), additional linkages are being built onto Zambia’s SCT. Under the ‘cash plus’, new questions are being posed as to how the SCT can be usefully coupled with other programmes and services, in order to move people not only closer to, but above, the poverty line (Gasior et al. 2021). So far, however, these linkages remain within the social protection sector itself, for example, by coupling assistance with empowerment interventions. One possibility to go further would be to link social protection empowerment programmes to economic policies aimed at fostering domestic businesses. Enabling individuals to set up micro-enterprises is one intended outcome of schemes such as Supporting Women’s Livelihoods (World Bank 2022). Yet despite the evident improvement of individual lives through trading self-made clothing, peanut butter, or other goods, the real threshold is the accessing of bigger markets. The newly created Zambian Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) is specifically meant to support upcoming businesses to overcome such thresholds, such as by negotiating access to supermarket chains on their behalf. Currently, however, no linkage exists between the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) and the MSME.
Another idea for connecting social and economic aims comes from Zambian history. Under the first president Kenneth Kaunda, the state invested in a multi-tier cooperative structure, the Zambian Cooperative Federation (ZCF), through which farmers were able to access credit, input, and advice, as well as being grouped together on the primary level. A marketing board, meanwhile, functioned as a reliable buyer of their produce. The ZCF was intricately connected to the then ruling party, which is why, in addition to adopting neoliberal adjustment reforms, the newly elected government in 1991 had no interest in supporting it further.
Since then, cooperatives have been highly individualised: while they still exist, oversight and support through the state have dwindled, making cooperatives largely unsuccessful in reaping business opportunities. Cooperatives, too, now fall under the MSME, so working with them could provide a promising avenue for thinking about long-term graduation of social protection recipients into a regular business environment – while maintaining a level of protection and nurturing. As Mkandawire (2010) pointed out, innovations in and support to agriculture have historically been key avenues towards poverty reduction. In contexts of high levels of rural poverty, linking the social and agricultural sectors could be an effective step towards a more holistic vision and strategy for developmental social policy that would reduce poverty through developing new economic opportunities.
This article set out to take stock of the current expanded agenda of social protection and to discuss the tensions between protective and promotive objectives which characterise it. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, when ‘shock-responsive social protection’ drew on linkages with humanitarian relief, social protection has gained in visibility, and has accumulated even more objectives – to insure individuals against large-scale risks, to build human capital, and to stimulate inclusive growth. Various agendas have been hooked onto social protection and labelled ‘sensitive’ – child-sensitive, gender-sensitive, disability-sensitive – while adaptive social protection argues for social protection to become a climate-sensitive contributor to a just transition (ILO 2023). All of these framings remain rooted within the protective tradition. ‘Social protection plus’ or ‘cash plus’ argues for strengthened linkages between social assistance and other social sectors (education, health) and economic sectors (agriculture, labour markets), partly under a more promotive vision.
This might be considered a case of mission creep, with ever more functions and expectations being shifted onto the social protection agenda. Certainly, different agencies used the momentum of social protection to further their respective mandates, by building them into the design and evaluation of social assistance programmes. Moreover, linking protective and promotive objectives made it easier for agencies to work together across ideological differences. Governments were also attracted to the idea of potential returns on investment, if social assistance recipients could be nudged to invest in human capital, or supported to conduct business, and they adapted globalised models to what made sense in their respective context.
Despite the expanding agenda’s potential for better integration with wider developmental visions and strategies, it remains insufficiently discussed as to how social protection can be better linked to interventions and policies outside of its immediate realm. How can supply-side constraints be overcome, by more and better employment opportunities, better education facilities, and conducive agricultural and market conditions for smallholders? To create lasting poverty reduction effects, other ministries and sectors would have to come on board a state-driven developmental agenda.
Mkandawire (2010) argued that due to the neoliberal distrust of domestic coalitions, donors assumed that they were better placed to drive social welfare policies. Since international agencies have relatively circumscribed agendas, however, the task of connecting various sectors under broader social aims would likely have to fall to the state. From the perspective of cross-cutting planners, social protection and economic interventions could then be purposefully coupled under bigger developmental visions. Despite its remaining shortcomings, the momentum that social protection currently enjoys can be used to set such processes in motion.
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Copyright © 2024 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2024.118
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited, any modifications or adaptations are indicated, and the work is not used for commercial purposes.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 55 No. 2 October 2024 ‘Reimagining Social Protection’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.