Social protection and care: Does the Child Support Grant translate to social justice outcomes for female beneficiaries who receive it on behalf of their children?

Abstract

The book begins by situating the establishment of the CSG within the wider context of South Africa’s political and welfare history, and the global context of social protection. It starts off by making the case for a gendered and feminist perspective of social protection which takes into account the degree to which a given social protection instrument – in this case the CSG – has the potential to be transformative, and the extent to which it fosters or doesn’t, the dignity and freedom of the women who receive it. The author then discusses in detail South Africa’s history of poverty and inequality, correctly identifying and locating both the role of the past (i.e. legacy of apartheid) and the failure of the present in addressing poverty and inequality. In this chapter, the book highlights the delicate tension between the country’s constitutional imperative of and commitment to redistribution, and a neoliberal macro-economic framework which prioritises the market, and how these contradictions continue to shape South Africa’s social protection system.