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Report of the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support

August 1996

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
A NOTE ON RACIAL NAMING

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Introduction
2 Patterns of poverty in South Africa, with special reference to women and children
3 A state response to poverty: social security
4 The projected costs of equity and parity
5 The Terms of Reference of the Committee

CHAPTER 2: THE CONTEXT AND THE APPROACH

1 Introduction
2 The disruption of family life
3 The effects of the HIV/ AIDS on children and on families
4 Changing welfare policy and programmes
5 Present changes in social security regulations
6 Domestic and international commitments to the rights of women and children
7 Changing economic policy
8 The approach

CHAPTER 3: POLICY ISSUES IN CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT

1 Introduction
2 Targeting
3 Means tests
4 Other assessment and targeting mechanisms
5 Incentives: the relationship between support programmes and behaviour
6 Costs
7 Administrative capacity
8 The locus of control over scope and level of benefits
9 Conclusion

CHAPTER 4: POLICY OPTIONS IN CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT

1 Introduction
2 Parental maintenance through the judicial system
3 Nutrition interventions
4 Free health care
5 Support for early childhood development
6 Public works programmes
7 Income generating projects and small, micro and medium enterprises
8 The Flagship Programme for Unemployed Women with Children 0 - 5
9 The social welfare/ social security link
10 Initiatives by social workers in government departments and in welfare organisations
11 Corporate sector partnerships
12 Social funds
13 Conclusion

CHAPTER 5: THE PRIVATE MAINTENANCE SYSTEM

1 Introduction
2 The problem
3 Issues and debates
4 The way forward

CHAPTER 6: THE PROVISION AND FINANCING OF WELFARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHILD AND FAMILY POLICY AND PROVISION

1 Introduction
2 The development of fragmented welfare services
3 The state welfare budget
4 Statutory work done by private organisations for the state
5 Non-governmental sources of funding for social services
6 Performance criteria in welfare
7 Private sector coverage of welfare
8 The racial development of family policy
9 Forms of social security and welfare provision in child and family care
10 The costs of child care in different environments
11 Conclusion

CHAPTER 7: RECOMMENDATIONS

1 Introduction
2 Chief elements of the proposals
3 Substantive issues
4 Anticipated negative consequences of the proposal
5 Conclusion

CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION

1 Introduction
2 Opportunities for public comment and participation
3 Implications for the Department of Welfare
4 Collaboration with the Department of Health
5 Collaboration with the Department of Justice
6 Collaboration with the Department of Home Affairs
7 Collaboration with the Department of Education
8 Promotion of an understanding of the links between social welfare, social security and development
9 Conclusion

APPENDICES

Appendix 1: The work and process of the Committee
Appendix 2: Research commissioned by the Committee
Appendix 3: The Itala think tank: participants and sponsors
Appendix 4: South African commitments to national and international conventions in the field of child and family care: a selection with special reference to women and children in poverty
Appendix 5: Analysis of the records of Maintenance Assistance Services
Appendix 6: Using formulae for the assessment of parental maintenance awards
Appendix 7: Participants at the workshop on Parental Maintenance held in Cape Town on 26 July 1996
Appendix 8: Proposed changes to the parental maintenance system
Appendix 9: Statement from the National Children's Rights Committee
Appendix 10: Additional tables regarding the age cohorts level of benefit, and budgetary requirement

FIGURES

Figure 1: Stunting rates among children below five by Quintiles (%)
Figure 2: Average annual value of State Maintenance Grants (1990-Rands)
Figure 3: Number of State Maintenance Grants per thousand children aged 0 - 17
Figure 4: Change in general government expenditure on some functions, fiscal years 1990/91 to 1996/97, 1990-Rands

TABLES

Table 1: Maximum monthly amounts of state social security benefits, June 1966 and July 1996, Rands
Table 2: The distribution of African children in households with and without transfer income (Old Age Pension and/or Disability Grant), 1993
Table 3: Parental maintenance statistics, Western Cape, 01.01.95 - 30.04.96
Table 4: The main votes in the welfare budget: Social Security (2), Social Assistance (3), and Social Welfare Facilities (4), by province, 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure
Table 5: Provincial Estimates of Expenditure on categories of social security, 1995/96
Table 6: Maternity applications and benefits as a percentage of the total Unemployment Insurance Fund, 1993
Table 7(a): Child and family care grants in the social security budget, 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure, Rand '000
Table 7(b): Child and family care grants in the social security budget, 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure, percentages
Table 8: Costs of child care in different environments, March 1996
Table 9: Percentages of children who would be reached using varying age cohorts, monthly levels of benefit, and annual budgetary requirements, (ages in 1997/98)

BOXES

Box 1: Summary of Recommendations
Box 2: The advantages of the proposed child support benefit 91

REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The terrain covered by the Lund Committee of Child and Family Support was broad and difficult. The time given to complete the work - six months - was short. The Committee is grateful to a number of individuals and institutions who responded generously and promptly to requests for assistance.

The Committee relied on the Department of Welfare in Pretoria for administrative and other support. Those involved in the routine work are acknowledged in Appendix 1; many others assisted as well. The Committee had the full backing of the former Deputy Minister and now Minister of Welfare, Ms Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, M.P., and of the Director General, Dr Leila Patel.

The Committee commissioned a number of researchers (Appendix 2) whose enthusiasm and willingness to produce against strict deadlines was much appreciated. The 'Itala think tank', a five day meeting in the Itala Game Reserve, was a turning point for the Committee in terms of the conceptualising of policy alternatives, as well as for forging an identity for itself. Participants, sponsors, and organisers are named in Appendix 3.

The Law, Race and Gender Research Unit at the University of Cape Town was involved collaboratively in much of the research on the parental maintenance system. In addition to those who helped with this part of the Committee's work who are acknowledged in Appendix 7, thanks go to Fran Biggs, Hilda Boikanyo, Brigitte Clark, Lovell Fernandez, Ingrid Freitag, Ooshara Garach, Reg Graycar, Judith Griessel, Willie Henegan, Chuma Himonga, Bastienne Klein, John Kruger, Joy-Marie Lawrence, Victoria Meyer, Essa Moosa, Marilynn Sager, Sharon Thomas, Stewart Ting-chong, and the participants in the Law, Race and Gender magistrate's workshop of 30 March 1996.

The National Welfare, Social Service and Development Forum, in particular Thabang Rakhetla, and Forum members in provincial branches, assisted with the arrangement of meetings in the provinces.

Office space and facilities, and administrative assistance, were provided for the Chairperson by the Durban Regional Office of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Social Welfare and Population Development. Thanks are due to Dr Neville Becker and his staff, in particular Heila Montile.

The Chairperson expresses her appreciation to a number of people who made the effects of their own work felt in particular ways. These include Sandra Burman, Neli Dlamini, Maud Dlomo, Ann Duncan, Cornie Groenewald, Barbara Hogan, Dudley Horner, Sarah Jonsson, Barbara Klugman, Priscilla Mackay, Benny Mokaba, Shirin Motala,

Dierdre Moyle, Clive Pintusewitz, Jinny Rickards, Viviene Taylor, Davine Thaw, Kees van der Waal and Alan Whiteside.

Richard Devey and Mary Smith of the Centre for Social and Development Studies, University of Natal in Durban, gave spirited assistance with the construction of tables and graphs, and with the production of the report.

While appreciating the support of all those mentioned above, the Committee itself bears responsibility for the findings and recommendations which follow.

A NOTE ON RACIAL NAMING

Under apartheid the South African population was classified into four main 'race groups': African, coloured, Indian and white. The policies associated with apartheid affected different these groups in different ways, and in a study of this sort it is essential to persist with this racial naming. The term 'black' is used in the report to refer collectively to all people not classified 'white'. Other than that, the four separate categories of African, coloured, Indian and white have been used throughout.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY [Top]

1 Statement of the problem and Terms of Reference

Former South African governments introduced social security measures for the support of poor people. They were introduced for white people and were gradually extended to include all South Africans, though there was racial discrimination in the scope and levels of benefits.

There are four categories of state support: for elderly people, for people with disabilities, for child and family care, and social relief. The main grant in the field of child and family care is the State Maintenance Grant. A woman has been eligible for this means-tested grant if she has applied for financial support from her partner or the father of her children through a magistrate's court, and has been unable to get it; or if she was widowed, deserted, or under certain under other conditions.

All South Africans in the former Republic of South Africa were eligible for the grant, but for a variety of reasons African women were largely excluded from access. Most of the former homelands and the 'independent states' did not administer it. In 1995, about R1.2 billion was spent on State Maintenance Grants. It would cost between R5 billion and R20 billion annually, depending on assumptions made, if all women who were eligible for the grant under present conditions were to get it.

The Committee of the Minister of Welfare and the Provincial Members of the Executive Council (the Welfare MINMEC) was concerned about the future affordability of the State Maintenance Grant and established the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support to investigate the problem. A number of factors combined to broaden the Terms of Reference of the Committee beyond concern solely with the State Maintenance Grant:

• The judicial or private maintenance system functions so poorly that many women turn early to the state for the support of themselves and their children.
• The State Maintenance Grant itself has become difficult to administer partially because it is based on a model of family life which does not fit the reality of many South African men and women and children.
• The Department of Welfare is reorienting itself towards developmental social welfare, and to programmes of reconstruction and development. It is committed to the ongoing development of social security, but hopes over time to reduce the numbers of South Africans relying on social security as a main means of support.
• South Africa has made a number of international commitments to the rights of women and of children and for the protection of families.
• The government is committed to reducing the fiscal deficit and promoting economic growth; it has signalled that social sectors such as health, education and welfare should not anticipate significant budgetary increases in the short term.

The Terms of Reference of the Committee, then, were:

1. To undertake a critical appraisal of the existing system of state support, in all departments, to children and families.
2. To investigate the possibility of increasing parental financial support through the private maintenance system.
3. To explore alternative policy options in relation to social security for children and families as well as other anti-poverty, economic empowerment and capacity-building strategies.
4. To develop approaches for effective targeting of programmes for children and families.
5. To present a report giving findings and recommendations.

The Committee convened in February 1996. It comprised persons identified directly by MINMEC, persons nominated by organisations identified by MINMEC, co-opted members, and representatives of the Department of Welfare (Appendix 1). The Committee worked as a technical committee as it could not engage in a consultative process within 6 months. It commissioned research (Appendix 2), called on national and international expertise (Appendix 3), and engaged in limited visits to departments and non-governmental organisations in the provinces, as well as key national agencies, to inform them of the Committee's work, to gather data about grants in the field of child and family care, and to get a rapid overview of new development initiatives.

2 The investigation

A notable international phenomenon is that family forms are changing. In developed and developing countries, there are more single parents, more households headed by women, and more people living outside the conventional model of the nuclear family. Yet the nuclear family is the model on which the State Maintenance Grant is based. Former South African governments preached family preservation as a social policy, while their economic and political policies systematically disrupted family life for people who were not white. Thus some of the fragmentation of families in all population groups is part of a broader phenomenon, but the specific effects of apartheid policies affected the African population particularly severely. Those same policies locked the majority of people into poverty.

The primary responsibility for the support of children should lie with parents, and this responsibility should continue whether or not the relationship between the parents survives. South Africa's legal vehicle for such support if the parental relationship breaks down is the judicial maintenance system. The central problems with this system are administrative, rather than there being defects in the law. It works so poorly that the government is sending the wrong signals about parental responsibility, and in particular about the financial responsibility of fathers.

When mothers are unable to provide for themselves, and cannot get support from the fathers of their children, the state social security system comes into play. A growing body of research demonstrates the vital role that the existing social security benefits for elderly people, people with disabilities and for families, play in poverty alleviation. They are relatively well-targeted for households in poverty, and to rural areas, and to women. The State Maintenance Grant has enabled children to be cared for by their own mothers or other kin. If this arrangement fails, children may have to be placed in other forms of provision. A child is more at risk the further he or she is from a nurturing environment. Furthermore, forms of provision become increasingly expensive for the state the further the child is removed from his or her own family.

Social security is one of a number of possibilities for the support of children and families. The Committee scanned alternative programmes and policies such as the free health care for women and children, early childhood education, and the public works programmes for their contribution to the whole package of support, as well as for their potential for creating productive opportunities for women to work. These were considered alongside the change towards developmental social welfare, which offers the potential for more assertive initiatives for the full development of people's capacities.

Many of the smaller welfare and development projects are unsustainable, and do not tackle problems of scale. Micro-enterprise and small business development are important development strategies. Their successful growth, however, is difficult given the lack of access to resources faced by women or men in deep poverty.

The view of the Committee is that the welfare sector, while assertively addressing development needs, should not define itself primarily as a job creation programme. The past century of dis-welfares has created long term damage, with long term casualties. Multi-pronged and inter-sectoral interventions should be integrated with social security provision.

3 The recommendations

The Committee developed a proposal which integrates the promotion of the financial responsibility of parents with the introduction of a child support benefit. The latter would be financed by the phasing out of the State Maintenance Grant in its present form over a five year period.

Reform of the parental maintenance system

The chief objective of this reform is to switch the signals which the judicial and welfare maintenance system is giving to parents, particularly fathers. The Committee was aware of the widespread dissatisfaction with the system, and acted as the vehicle through which key stakeholders were brought together to reach agreement about needed reforms (Appendix 7). These have been consolidated in a document (Appendix 8) which has been submitted to the Department of Justice and to the South African Law Commission.

The Committee also proposes a public campaign promoting a culture of payment; information sharing between magistrates offices so that the good examples of innovation can be shared; and research into maintenance in rural areas.

Introduction of a flat-rate child support benefit

A flat-rate child support benefit should be introduced which should be paid, via the primary care-giver, to all children who qualify in terms of a test of the care-giver's means. The benefit is aimed at protecting the poorest children in their most vulnerable years.

The child's birth would have to be registered to qualify for the benefit. The uneven spread of registering offices will make this difficult for some, but without duly registered births and identification, no new system will succeed.

The Committee identified a potential area of creative synergy between primary health care and primary welfare care through the proposed benefit. The care-giver should be obliged to engage in certain health related activities in relation to the child or children in her (or his) care for the grant to be awarded, and for the grant to continue. The most likely activities are growth monitoring, and ensuring that the child is fully immunised. The Department of Health should take the lead in determining the possibilities, and there is room for provincial variation.

For delivery, the ideal to aim for is a system that is simple, computerised, and with the least opportunity for abuse. The monthly delivery of a small amount of cash would be negative in many ways. The benefit should be transferred into a bank or post office on a quarterly basis, and drawn whenever the care-giver wishes, in whatever amounts. This would contribute to the broader development goal of enabling marginalised rural people, especially women, to engage with local formal financial institutions. The Committee is well aware of the distances many rural people live from town centres. However most people do go to centres from time to time.

The Household Subsistence Level can be used as the basis for determining the lower level of the benefit. The core trade-off is between a higher benefit for fewer children, and a lower one which will reach more children. Age can be used as a cost-containment mechanism.

Continuation of the Care Dependency Grant

This grant is payable to the carers of children whose intellectual and physical impairment is so profound that they require full time care. It directly saves the costs of much more expensive institutional care. The grant should continue.

Continuation of the Foster Care Grant

This Grant should continue. It is a vital lifeline for the care of children. The procedure for processing and supervising Foster Care Grants should be reviewed as a matter of urgency so that it places less strain on the judicial system, on social workers, and on the time and resources of prospective and existing foster parents.

Further recommendations

Further recommendations were that the Department of Welfare should develop, as a matter of urgency, a strategic position with and in relation to other departments as to the limits of its responsibility in responding to the effects on households and on patterns of child care as a results of HIV/ AIDS.

New links between social security and social work personnel should be forged, with all provincial departments of welfare being required to report regularly on steps that have been taken to integrate social security with developmental social welfare.

There should be bold changes in social work and community development curricula,recognising that the demand for conventional welfare services continues, at the same time as social workers need to be better equipped for the demands of developmental social welfare. Research in the field of social security, social policy and inequality should be encouraged.

The welfare sector should lend its active support to the development of appropriate reproductive health services, and life skills education in schools.

Conclusion

If the recommendations are accepted, collaborative work with other departments, in particular with Justice, Health, Home Affairs, Education and Labour will be needed. Furthermore, the Department has a key role in negotiating with other agencies to provide opportunities for people who will be phased out of the existing State Maintenance Grant. The Department of Welfare itself cannot hope to take responsibility for the welfare of all the people who will be affected.

It is inevitable that there will be controversy about these proposals. They mark a shift away from past policies of family preservation. One organisation with a representative on the Committee found the shift so severe that it has submitted a statement to this effect (Appendix 9). The benefits of past policies, however, affected a minority of South Africans. The proposals here will be decisively distributive towards many thousands of poor children who have not received support in the past. The child support benefit will contribute, in a modest way, as one source of household income, and will be promoted as being clearly linked to the health and nutritional status of the child.

The Committee is firm in its belief that this cash benefit will be a more reliable form of support than the alternatives it considered. In a society of such extreme inequalities, social spending of this sort is an important contributor to household income. It should be seen as part of a bundle of private and state support for the development of vulnerable groups, and the alternatives should not be seen as mutually exclusive. It should be seen as a minimum basis from which incremental growth can take place.

CHAPTER ONE [Top]

INTRODUCTION

1 Introduction

The central domain of this report is poverty in South Africa, and the particularly vulnerable position of women and children. This Chapter thus starts with a brief situation analysis of patterns of poverty. It draws extensively on recent surveys and reports giving special attention to indicators concerning women and children.

The Chapter then goes on to consider the arguments for one mechanism of poverty alleviation which has been chosen by the South African government, previous and present: state social security, in particular, the State Maintenance Grants. This is followed by a description of the financial crisis created by attempts to overcome the presently unequal racial distribution of the grants. This crisis led to the establishment of the Committee, whose Terms of Reference are given at the end of the Chapter.

2 Patterns of poverty in South Africa, with special reference to women and children

South Africa is characterised by extremes of wealth, and of inequality. It is classified as a middle income developing country, but has 'two nations' within it - a small number of very wealthy people, and the vast majority who are very poor. The Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) shows that poverty:

• is racially distributed: 95% of the poor are African
• is spatially distributed: 75% of the poor live in rural areas, although only just over half of the population lives there
• has a gender dimension: many of the very poorest households are those headed by younger women in rural areas. (Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1995)

In general, poverty rates and shares are worst for the African population, and white South Africans are the wealthiest. Indicators for coloured people tend to look more like those for Africans though they are not as extreme. Social and economic indicators for the Indian population have come to resemble those of whites in recent years.

Poverty is closely associated with very high unemployment rates, regardless of how they are measured. Most of the poor do not have formal jobs; many of the poor and not-so-poor are in the informal sector. Employed life is characterised by insecurity: under-employment, erratic employment, and jobs which are so insecure that they cannot promise certain futures. The migrant labour system, though it could be categorised as 'formal employment', did not provide the wages or the permanency to allow workers to make private provision for their later years in retirement.

Women's participation in the labour market has increased substantially, but they still account for only 39.6% of the labour force. Their under-representation is partly accounted for by those who are classified as 'housewives' but also, and more importantly, by large numbers of women who make a living in the subsistence sector. Analysis of the 1991 census reveals that woman accounted for only 9.3% of persons with an annual income of R300 000 or more, but 59% of those with incomes between R1 and R999.

Among those who are included in the labour force, a larger proportion of women are unemployed. The International Labour Organisation's definition of unemployment includes 'discouraged' workers who are not actively searching for work because they know they have little hope of success. Using this definition, the unemployment rate for women was 35.2% in 1993 and for men 25.7%. The comparable rates for African women and men were even higher, at 44.2% and 33.6%.

Those lucky enough to be employed are disadvantaged compared to men because they are largely confined to different sectors, and different jobs within sectors. Thus 34% of all women in formal employment are African women employed in the social services. Thirty percent of African women in formal employment are domestic workers. At the other end of the scale, women occupy under 1.5% of all directorships in major South African companies. African women occupy under 0.5% of directorships.

Within industry, a large number of women are employed in textiles, clothing and leather, all of which are female-dominated in terms of overall employment, and all of which pay low wages compared to most other industries. In the past these industries have all enjoyed relatively high levels of protection from cheap imports in other countries. Current government policy is to reduce protection substantially by removing tariffs. In other countries research has shown that women generally bear a disproportionately large burden of adjustment costs.

Most available statistics reflect the position of those in formal employment. However, while the formal economy is dominated by men, the more precarious informal economy is dominated by women. Analysis of the October Household Survey of 1994 indicates that African women account for 60% of all workers 'for own account'. Eighty-eight percent of these women are employed in the unskilled work classified as 'elementary' occupations. The majority form what is termed the 'survivalist' sector, rather than running emerging or prosperous businesses.

Many African people in rural areas are on large commercial farms. Those in the former homelands and independent states experience a high degree of landlessness. In this respect South Africa is atypical of other developing countries. The PSLSD survey shows only a quarter (26.2%) of households in rural areas having access to land (Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1995).

In rural areas, which is where most poor women and children are, there is little easy access to such basic services as running water in the home, sanitation, and fuel. Water and fuel collection are tasks undertaken almost exclusively by women and girls, with more than three hours a day on average being spent on water collection.

South Africa's health system is unevenly developed, and the health status of its citizens likewise. While the majority of children do have contact with the health services around birth, there is still a very high Infant Mortality Rate (the IMR). The racial differences in the IMR are good indicators of racial inequality as a whole: the 86 per 1000 live births for Africans, and 94 for rural infants (Mazur of the Medical Research Council, quoted in Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1996: 51) are more than tenfold the 7.3 per 1 000 which was a 1990 estimate for whites. Child Mortality Rates in the African population are also very high.

Pregnant mothers, and children's contact with the health services is higher in urban than in rural areas, and high in rural areas whenever health services are there. In other words, it does not seem to be the case that parental attitudes constitute a barrier to access. However, babies lose contact with health services during their first year and later, and there is a high rate of incomplete immunisations. Tuberculosis and measles, both primary killers of infants, are easily preventable with vaccination.

For a country at its level of development, the nutritional status of South Africa's citizens is poor. It is estimated that 2.3 million citizens are nutritionally compromised - including 87% of all African children under 12 years old. Figure 1, drawn from the PSLSD (Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1995), shows the close association between stunting and poverty. In the poorest expenditure quintile (Q1, the poorest 20% of the population), 38% of children are stunted, and this rate decreases consistently as wealth levels increase up to those in the fifth quintile, Q5, which contains the wealthiest people.

Source: Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1995.

South Africa's school attendance levels are high. Most children between 5 and 16 go to school, with an 85% attendance rate at the primary school level, and with little difference between girl children and boy children. Many drop out before completing school, and there the rate is higher for girl children. Also, many African children are still completing secondary school in their early twenties. There is the expected high correlation between poverty and not continuing into tertiary education. The chief concern about children in education is not about willingness to attend school, or parental permission to do so, as is the case in some developing countries. The concern is with the quality of teaching, and with conditions in classrooms.

There is growing concern about the situation of child labour. This has focused in the past mainly on African and coloured children working on commercial farms owned by whites. Figures extracted from the October Household Survey of 1994 suggest that of children who are in those white agricultural areas, 11% between 10 and 14 years old, and 21% between 15 and 17, work, mostly in farming activities (Bosch and Gordon, 1996). More recent concerns have been the increase in child sex workers in towns and cities, children working in the entertainment industry, and in domestic and informal sector activities.

Child labourers are one category in a broader grouping designated by the international children's rights movements as 'children in especially difficult circumstances', also termed 'children in distress' (McKerrow and Verbeek, 1995). This umbrella refers to children in circumstances which deny them their most basic rights. It includes many who due to South Africa's particular political history have suffered through political violence, being displaced from their homes and communities, and being orphaned or uncared for as a result of such events.

Professional child workers point to a group of children which is perhaps more worrying because less visible: the chronically neglected children. They are not wholly abandoned, or orphaned, but consistently fail to receive adequate nurturing, nutrition, and stimulation from parents or other adults.

A more detailed account of the disruption of family life will be the focus of Chapter 2. What are the possible responses of governments to such situations of poverty, and what role does social security have to play in the alleviation of these conditions?

3 A state response to poverty: social security

There is a variety of ways in which governments may intervene to provide relief to those in poverty, and to try to build pathways out of poverty. Some of the familiar programmes are around nutrition, education, health, job training, support for small businesses, and public works programmes. The possible contribution of these alternatives were considered by the Committee, and form the subject of Chapter 3.

Social security is one policy option for the support of children and families. Whiteford (personal communication) stresses the importance of being clear about the objective of support to children and families. These may be to:

• contribute to the costs of raising children
• redistribute income over the life cycle
• influence the birth rate
• provide a degree of equity in taxation
• relieve child poverty
• enable parents to care for children independently of the labour market
• boost low earnings
• reduce demands for a minimum wage
• increase incentives to work
• relieve unemployment or low income traps.

Many of these are related. In the South African situation, given the extreme poverty that exists, the Committee appraised the role of social security with special reference to its role in alleviating poverty, through contributing to the costs of raising children.

State social security falls into four categories: pensions for elderly people, pensions for people with disabilities, grants in the field of child and family care, and social relief. Table 1 shows the maximum monthly amounts of the various types of grants in June 1996, and with the increases which were awarded during July 1996. More detail about the system will be presented later. Here, the intention is to demonstrate the important role that social security payments have made, and continue to make, to the household income of many of South Africa's poor.

Table 1: Maximum monthly amounts of state social security benefits, June 1996 and July 1996, Rands

* Previously, a grant could be received for up to four legitimate and one illegitimate child; regulations under the Social Assistance Act of 1992 have changed this to up to two children regardless of their legal status.

Table 1 shows that the main grants are now at a uniform level, which was R430 in July 1996.

3.1 The role of the Old Age Pension and Disability Grant in household incomes

Researchers have argued for some time that, although the past social security system was racially discriminatory, difficult to access, and unreliable to maintain, it nevertheless made an important contribution as a household security measure (see for example Ardington and Lund, 1995; le Roux, 1995; Lund, 1992). As the scope and level of the grant was extended to include all South Africans, and as delivery systems penetrated deep into rural areas, its impact grew.

The pension or grant is drawn by individual pensioners or disabled people. But the majority of elderly and disabled people in poverty live in families with three or more generations, and the money is largely pooled as household income (Møller and Sotshongaye, forthcoming). Poorer households have more people in them (the 20% poorest households in South Africa contain 29% of the population, for example), thus the pension 'trickles down' to many more people than the individual beneficiary.

Thus le Roux estimates that of the approximately 16 million poorest South Africans, nearly one third or 5 million are in households receiving pensions. He states that in the bottom quintile of Africans:

... the average increase in the per capita income of all because of the pensions is more than double (206%) the original per capita income. If one only considers households actually receiving pensions, the average increase in per capita income is nearly six times the per capita income without pensions (573%) (Le Roux in the Smith Committee, 1995: Annexure S1: 7).

The social security payments thus have an important distributional impact. The means test is applied imperfectly; nevertheless research shows that the grants go to the poorer households - they are well-targeted for poverty. There is some leakage to better off households, but in comparative international terms the South African system performs well. A KwaZulu-Natal study found that the very poorest income decile (tenth) of households was not reached by the grants; manipulation of the data showed that it was the receipt of the state assistance that kept those in the next two deciles out of the bottom decile (Ardington and Lund, 1995).

Elderly people themselves say that the most reliable aspect of the monthly pension is its contribution to household security: it is reliable, the date on which it will arrive is known in advance, thus enabling financial planning. The pension contributes to income smoothing, being spread for example over all stages of the agricultural production cycle. It also helps cope with crises of seasonality - an important one of which is the beginning of the school year when children's educational expenses are high.

They are well-targeted for rural areas. Coverage is still patchy and uneven, but the pensions are one of the few state resources which extend broadly and deeply into remoter parts of the country.

The pensions and grants perform well in gender terms. The Old Age Pension goes to more women than men: women live longer than men do, and they draw the pension earlier, at 60 as opposed to men's 65 year age of eligibility. In most developing countries, cash which enters the house and is controlled by women is more likely to be positively associated with money spent on 'virtuous goods', such as food for children, and educational expenses, than if it is controlled by men.

Given that pensioners themselves talk about the important impact the pension money has in contributing to children's upkeep, it is important to investigate the numbers of children in transfer households - households which receive a pension or grant.

Table 2: The distribution of African children in households with and without transfer income (Old Age Pension and/or Disability Grant), 1993

Source: Calculations using PSLSD data

Table 2 shows how households with social pensions (both Old Age Pension and Disability Grant) have substantially more children under 20 than do households without transfer income. Of all African households, over half (52.8%) of those receiving transfers contain a child of 0 - 4 years, compared to 43% of non-transfer households. The differences increase slightly as the age of children increases, presumably because it is more likely there is an elderly person in the household.

Not shown in the table is the fact that of households in which there are children less than 5 years old, 69.5% are in rural areas, and a third of these are in households in which there is an Old Age Pension or Disability Grant. Of households with transfer incomes and which have at least one child under 5, nearly half (48.7%) were female headed - because of the numbers of elderly women who receive the Old Age Pension and are heads because of being widowed.

3.2 The role of the State Maintenance Grant in coloured households

The African population bore the brunt of the inequalities created by apartheid. It is also the case that many non-Africans, and in particular people classified coloured, were and are very poor. The State Maintenance Grant has contributed significantly to coloured household income, especially in the former Cape Province. There has been little study of the economic impact of the Grant to date.

The research commissioned from Datadesk by the Committee comprised three studies in the Western Cape. First, samples were drawn from Idas Valley and Cloeteville in urban Stellenbosch; second, interviews were conducted with all of the permanent households in Goedverwacht which is rural but within commutable distance from a town; and third, interviews with conducted with half of the households in deep rural Zoar.

The research found that there were very high income inequalities in all the areas. In Zoar, the top decile received 32% of all income, while the bottom decile received 1.9%. Nearly a third (30%) of all Zoar households were below the Household Subsistence Level.

State Maintenance Grants and other state transfers played an important role in keeping households above the Household Subsistence Level. About 45% of households not receiving grants fell below the Household Subsistence Level, while the corresponding percentage for households receiving grants was 25%. Viewed in another way:

By subtracting per capita transfer income from total per capita income, all the households without a salary income drop far below the subsistence level, while 60% of households with at least one salary drop below the Household Subsistence Level. (Vorster et al, 1996:14)

This appears to be the first research which has empirically demonstrated the poverty alleviation role played specifically by the State Maintenance Grant.

3.3 Other advantages of cash versus in-kind benefits

The targeting of pensions in South Africa on the whole is not under dispute, and the distributional merits are clear. However there is often reticence about giving cash to poor people: there are fears that it will create dependency, and create negative incentives for work, savings and other factors which will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

An extensive literature (for example Dreze and Sen, 1989; Barr, 1995a and 1995b; Subbarao et al, 1995; Schubert, 1993; Schubert and Balzer, 1990) sets out the debates for and against cash benefits. The economic and developmental arguments for cash benefits, as opposed to in kind support, such as food, food vouchers, school vouchers, and the like are:

• they give poor people leverage
• they can be cost-effective
• they maintain markets and consumer discretion
• they provide entitlement and purchasing power for vulnerable groups, thus leaving the physical supply of the right food at the right time to the private sector
• there can be lower administrative costs
• they can have multiplier effects on incomes of the poor
• there is generally less loss through leakage and corruption.

One of the arguments against cash benefits is that during inflation the value of the cash benefit can erode significantly without recipients being aware of it. This may be used to the benefit of governments of course, as it was in South Africa. To cover some of the costs of racial parity in the pensions for elderly people, the real value of the pensions to white people was allowed to erode, and the white pensioner constituency was insufficiently organised to counteract this.

A common sentiment against cash benefits is the fear that beneficiaries may not spend the money on 'desirable' goods. There is little that can be done about this, on the grounds that what people choose to do with their entitlement is their own business. Schemes designed to narrow choices by providing in-kind goods such as certain sorts of food commonly find that the goods get traded for cash or other goods in any event.

Cash benefits on the whole are easier and cheaper to deliver than in-kind schemes. They also have the virtue that they are relatively easy to make more efficient, especially with new information technology. Furthermore, when delivered efficiently, they hold out greater possibilities than do most other development initiatives that resources will go into the pockets of the really poor, rather than being skimmed off by middle-men.

In social security a large amount of the money goes directly to the poor. Administrative costs are relatively small, and a very small part of the overall welfare budget goes for the salaries of personnel, relative to health and education, for example. This is because of the size of the social security part of the welfare budget. The Health Department and Education Departments spend in the order of 60% and 80% respectively on personnel. In Welfare, personnel costs constitute less than 5% of spending. Cash benefits to poor people also have the potential of cutting many of the non-poor middle-men who benefit from other types of development projects.

The former government committed itself to racial parity in the pensions and grants, and achieved it for the elderly and for people with disabilities in 1993. For different reasons, the State Maintenance Grants remain unevenly allocated and administered. The new constitution demands equity and parity of whatever services are offered.

3 The projected costs of equity and parity

Social security systems all over the world have a characteristic in common: once a benefit (pension or grant) is introduced for a limited sector of the population, public pressure grows for coverage to be extended. In South Africa this characteristic took a racial form. In 1921 the South African government introduced a system of family support for the protection of white families in poverty. As with other benefits such as the Old Age Pension and the Disability Grant, the family support measures were gradually increased in coverage to include coloured and Indian South Africans. Only Africans with rights to live in urban areas were at first included.

In the 1960s the South African government started the process of creating the independent states (TBVC) and self governing territories (the six homelands). Welfare for black people in the old white South Africa became a provincial function. By the beginning of the 1980s, the child and family benefits were administered through many different administrations. The grants (which had a Parent Allowance and a Child Allowance as part of the same grant) for whites, Indians, coloured people and black people in the provinces were called more or less the same thing. The main difference between administrations was the amount awarded. In line with all other social security benefits, the pattern was that whites received the highest amount, followed by Indian and coloured people at the same level, with Africans receiving the lowest amount.

In the former welfare administrations serving black people there was little consistency in what happened to the State Maintenance Grants. Some administrations did not award them at all; some had them in the regulations but in fact did not apply them; some awarded only the child part of the grant, and not the parent part.

As white levels of living increased, white people were gradually means tested out of the child and family part of the social security system. During the seventies and eighties there was a steep increase in the numbers of grants awarded to coloured and Indian people, while African people remained de jure or de facto excluded from the child and family grants.

Source: Figure constructed by Servaas van der Berg

Source: Figure constructed by Servaas van der Berg

Figure 2 shows that there was a decline in value of the State Maintenance Grant in real terms over the last 20 years. The grant for white people more than halved in value from a high of R8 000 per annum in 1976 to its 1990 value of R3 600 (in 1990 rands). The level of the grant for coloured and Indian people stayed much the same over the same 20 years, with a gradual decrease in value over the last 10 years.

On the other hand, Figure 3, also sourced from van der Berg, shows clearly the heart of the problem, and the driving reason behind the establishment of the Committee. In 1990, in the total population about 8 of every 1 000 children between 0 and 17 were in receipt of the grant. However, coloured and Indian people received a disproportionately high number of the benefits - 48 and 40 per 1 000 coloured and Indian children respectively. The 15 per 1 000 white children remains quite high given white standards of living. It is the approximately 2 grants per 1 000 African children which shows the extremely inequitable nature of the State Maintenance Grants in the early 1990s.

Attempts have been made by John Kruger (1995, 1996), Pieter le Roux (Smith Committee, 1995), Servaas van der Berg (1994) and Claudia and Dirk Haarmann (1996) to estimate the likely fiscal impact of eliminating this discrimination in coverage. Low and high projections have been made using different assumptions. If one compares the take-up of such grants amongst coloured people to that amongst Africans, a gap of about 25 to one would indicate that perhaps R5 billion would have to be spent per annum in addition to the present approximately R1 billion, to reach all equally. Much higher estimates have been obtained using survey data and estimating from that who could be eligible, rather than only applying the coloured take-up rates; one study done for the Committee (Haarmann and Haarmann, 1996) estimated it would take more than R20 billion to close the gap.

The government has expressed a firm commitment in its recently published macro-economic strategy to reducing the budget deficit. There are competing demands for spending on infrastructure and other needed social services, so it is highly unlikely that government expenditure on family and child grants will be increased to the levels required to ensure equal access of all race groups to grants at the existing levels and under present eligibility conditions.

The South African economy is struggling to find its feet after two decades of sluggish growth, during which per capita income declined by some 18 %. The government is committed to combating backlogs and overcoming the present severe inequalities in the provision of basic goods and services such as education, health, housing and urban services. However it is constrained by its commitment to fiscal discipline so as to reduce the deficit, avoid high levels of debt, and encourage both domestic and foreign investment.

To reduce the deficit from its current level of over 5 % of GDP, as the government has undertaken to do in its macro-economic strategy, requires increased taxes and/or reduced expenditures. The government is fearful that tax increases that affect business or the rich will discourage investors and encourage the flight of capital and skills from the country. Tax increases on the poor are even less feasible. There has been a significant shift of the tax burden over the last 20 years from companies to individuals in the form of personal income tax and GST. On the other hand, decreasing state expenditure is difficult in the face of the government's commitment to address inequalities in provision for the formerly disenfranchised. Further, the promised public sector wage increases will largely erode the gains of cutbacks in civil service personnel.

Thus there is little fiscal room for manoeuvre for the government. One avenue is that to be provided by the hoped-for higher economic growth, which would generate more income even without an increase in taxes. However this will not happen immediately. Secondly the government's macro-economic strategy envisages that selling off some state assets or bringing in private partners may raise funds which could be used to reduce the outstanding debt and thereby diminish the interest payments which currently take up one-fifth of the budget.

Over the last 5 years there has been a redirection of resources towards social spending. A major beneficiary, in percentage terms, has been spending on welfare and social security.

* The 'etc.' refers to costs such as water related to housing provision

Source: Based on figures supplied by Servaas van der Berg

Much of this extra expenditure has gone into eliminating the racially discriminatory spending levels of the past, and in particular equalising access to pensions for elderly people and for people with disabilities. Figure 4 shows how the spending increase in welfare - 120% over the fiscal years 1990/91 and 1996/97 - outpaced growth in other social sectors such as education, health and housing.

The figure also shows how spending on Defence almost halved in real terms. The growth in the welfare/ social security budget has now levelled out. Its future size will be driven by factors such as how welfare responds to demands for services relating to the spread of HIV/ AIDS; the ability of the Department to control the abuse of social security; the rate at which existing social security benefits grow; and the decisions made about grants in the field of child and family care.

The recent emphasis on developmental social welfare is generating calls for increased spending on welfare services. Given the low initial levels of spending on welfare services and capacity constraints in this sector, such spending increases would not place a heavy fiscal burden on the government (van der Berg, 1995). While such services are not an alternative for social security, this call, together with the past increases in the welfare budget, competing claims from other social sectors, and the fiscal stance of the macro-economic strategy, mean that the case for additional spending on social security will have to be put very strongly to get a sympathetic response from government.

5 The Terms of Reference of the Committee

Given the cost projections of reaching racial equity in the State Maintenance Grants, the Welfare MINMEC appointed a Committee of Enquiry to investigate the problem over a period of six months. Its Terms of Reference were:

1. To undertake a critical appraisal of the existing system of state support, in all departments, to children and families.
2. To investigate the possibility of increasing parental financial support through the private maintenance system.
3. To explore alternative policy options in relation to social security for children and families as well as other anti-poverty, economic empowerment and capacity-building strategies.
4. To develop approaches for effective targeting of programmes for children and families.
5. To present a report giving findings and recommendations.

Appendix 1 describes the formation and membership of the Committee, and the way in which the Committee was conducted.

CHAPTER TWO    [Top]

THE CONTEXT AND THE APPROACH

1 Introduction

The Committee grounded its work in the reality of households in poverty in South Africa. It was also aware of parallel policy initiatives which might affect the work of the Committee. This Chapter thus gives a picture of family structures in households which are poor, and then takes account of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, which will affect family life and the demand for health and welfare services. It then considers changing policy within welfare, and puts these alongside the array of domestic and international commitments to the rights of children and women which South Africa has made. A summary of changing macro-economic policy is then given, with some of its implications for women's participation in the labour market. This context provides the backdrop for the approach to its work which the Committee took: the guidelines are made explicit in the last section of the Chapter.

2 The disruption of family life

A variety of research studies enable a depiction of characteristics of family life in households in poverty. Careful anthropological work is complemented by recent participatory poverty appraisals, done through community organisations, in which poor people speak for themselves, with little screening by academics (see for example Burman and Preston-Whyte, 1992; Jones, 1993; May, 1996; Teixeira and Chambers, 1995; Vorster et al, 1996).

To the extent that apartheid and other policies affected African people most severely, their situation receives most attention. It is important to note that this is not a cultural issue, or a racial one in any genetic sense. The characteristics of African and coloured family life are shared by poor households throughout the world. It is the case that specific pre-apartheid and apartheid policies in South Africa made the trends more severe. As early as 1911 a statutory colour bar was introduced in the mines, reserving certain job categories for particular races. The Land Act of 1917 legislated for racial segregation of land ownership; Africans were not allowed to buy land outside restricted reserves and 'scheduled areas', and African forms of share-cropping were prohibited. The 1920s and 1930s saw a growing battery of legislation to control the presence of Africans in urban areas, and the removal of black voting rights. When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948 it consolidated policies already in place, and started the mass removals and formalised the creation of bantustans which affected the family and economic lives of millions of South Africans.

Coloured family life in rural areas was deeply affected by the quasi-feudal system under which workers existed, including the notorious dopstelsel, or tot system, whereby a portion of the daily wage was paid in the form of regular amounts of alcohol which were consumed on the spot.

It is widely accepted that the vibrant and supportive extended family system among the Indian community was broken down by the combination of the Group Areas Act and the conditions governing size of houses in the new Indian townships - their small size forced the generations apart. Particularly high levels of domestic violence are reported in the press and by social workers working in Indian areas. Fewer Indian women work in the informal economy, and they will be proportionately worse affected by the deregulation of the clothing and textile industries.

White people's homes and jobs were protected by the previous government. There are more destitute white families now than previously, but relative to the levels of poverty among African and coloured households, the problem is small. White women will be able to rely less on the civil service for protected jobs. Increasing numbers of white women who have babies outside a marital union now choose to keep their children, rather than have them adopted.

However, as noted, it has been African family life which was most severely affected by past policies. The migrant labour system and the influx control measures separated men from their families for long periods; the bantustans locked people into rural areas. There was a systematic dispossession of families of land, then cattle. There was no natural development of small towns, which would have brought local work opportunities. Educational facilities were under-developed. Diseases contracted in the mines were 'exported' to the bantustans. Some of the consequences of these policies for family life are highlighted below.

The majority of households living in poverty contain three and often four generations. This is so for urban and rural areas, though more so for rural. Household size at the poorer end of the spectrum is much larger than in households which are better off, and this is different to the situation in many parts of the world where the poorest households are often female headed and smaller). It may be that an unintended side effect of the bantustan and migrant labour policies was that, while it removed men of working age, it made more likely the continuation of the extended family form.

There has been an increase in the number of female headed households, and there is an association between gender of household head and poverty. Calculations based on the PSLSD survey of 1993 found that the mean total household income for female headed households was R1 141 per month, compared to R2 089 for all households. The mean monthly income per head for female headed households was R243, compared to R468 for all households. When non-African households were excluded, the mean household income for female headed households was R833, compared to R1 005 for all African households (Govender et al, 1995).

In many of these households, the middle generation is incomplete or it is missing altogether. Father and/or mother may be away working. The absence may be for long stretches (as in the 'classic' migrant labour contract); or it may be on a monthly or weekly basis. Father and/or mother may be dead. A frequent occurrence is that a mother has a child with one partner, out of a formal union. When she has a child later with another man, he will not agree to care for another man's child. She leaves the child or children with her own mother, or aunt, or other traditional guardian. The PSLSD survey found about 20% of South African children were not living with either parent. McKerrow and Verbeek (1995) in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands found one in three children under sixteen not with the mother.

Many South Africans travel long distances to reach their places of employment. It is common, especially in poorer households, for parents to be 'present', but with little time for active parenting. Workers leave home before sunrise and return after dark, and are not there for their children.

High numbers of children are born out of formal partnerships. The concept of 'illegitimacy' is problematic in the South African context, where there are different cultures and customs; where betrothal is a drawn out event in the process of which a child may be born; where 'western' and traditional values and systems of paternal obligations exist side by side. Formal traditional polygamy is practised in some parts of the country; children born in polygamous marriages certainly have legitimate cultural status. The new welfare legislation does not stigmatise 'illegitimacy' as was done in the past.

There is a high number of pregnancies among young teenagers in temporary relationships. Children are born to girls who are little more than children themselves. They have little or no access to sex education, or to reproductive health services. Their schooling is interrupted by the birth, though the schooling may be continued later. According to a survey of out-of-school youth (Everatt and Jennings, 1995), 28% of the females (as opposed to 3% of males) gave pregnancy as the reason for dropping out of school (the racial breakdown among girls was 31% African, 11% white, 8% coloured, and 4% Indian). A demographic and health survey conducted between 1987 and 1989 found that '57.7% of African women, 50.1% of coloured women, 35.5% of Indian women and 21.1% of white women gave birth to their first child while teenagers' (van Zyl, 1993: 32).

Van der Waal's work in the Northern Province points to extremely high levels of domestic violence, and of emotional and physical abuse of children, especially girl children (van der Waal, 1995).

Numbers of South African men establish dual households. The precise extent of this 'double-rootedness' is unknown, but it is high. It is technically difficult to capture in surveys, and there may be reasons for non-disclosure. A typical history would be of a man leaving his rural place to work in town. Over the years he establishes roots in the town as well. He finally comes to have two permanent functioning households.

Thus many South African children, and especially children in poor circumstances, are not being continuously parented by either or both of their own parents. Non-parents may well provide good quality care. But there is a sequence of different care givers, and generations of children have been brought up with no paternal role models.

Household boundaries are fluid, as kin come and go to seek work or care for children. Children are moved about too, because a school is nearer, or in response to a crisis in the household.

Counteracting this picture of disruption and poverty is the extraordinary energy and commitment which individuals, families, organisations and religious groups devote to the care of children in communities, and to the development of women. Thousands of children are being cared for by kin rather than by their own birth parent. Non-governmental organisations and community based organisations provide an organising focus in urban and rural communities for child and woman support. The role of religious organisations has been strong as well.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, family forms are changing the world over. The reasons for this are complex; in South Africa, particular economic and political policies have put a particular stamp on the changes. South Africa now has a social security benefit - the State Maintenance Grant - which was derived from a model of family life which bears little relationship to the reality of family life for the vast majority of poor people for whom the grant is intended. One outcome of the lack of fit between the model and the reality is that the system is very easily abused: it provides incentives to both citizens and officials to manipulate it in their favour. This theme will be developed in Chapter 6.

3 The effects of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic on children and on families

With the exception of a few interest groups, the country appears to be in a state of denial about the presence of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and about its present and future effects on family life and on the economy. Although HIV/ AIDS is often posed narrowly as a health or a welfare problem, its effects on productivity, on household incomes, and on the ability of households to pay for services such as housing and water crosses all sectors.

Its effects will be more severe in some parts of the country than others, with populous KwaZulu-Natal being the most seriously affected in these early stages of the spread of the disease. The pattern of the epidemic is different in different parts of the world. The male homosexual community is the group most affected in other industrialised countries. In South Africa this community is relatively small and relatively well-educated, and thus more likely to change behaviour in directions which will limit the spread of the disease. In Southern Africa, HIV/ AIDS is spread mostly by heterosexual transmission. It disproportionately affects those living in conditions associated with poverty, and hence the African population is most seriously affected.

The middle generation - the 25 to 40 year age group - will experience the most severe rise in mortality, followed by the under 5 year age group (who get it through vertical transmission from infected mothers). Women will be more severely affected than men. The welfare sector will be most affected by an increase in the number of AIDS orphans, and in calls for 'community care' when formal health facilities are unable to cope. (An AIDS orphan is defined as a child under 15 whose mother has died of the disease.)

Two well-known studies in South Africa continuously model the influence AIDS will have on demographic structures. Both the Doyle model (quoted in Lategan, 1992: 3) and the Whiteside model (Whiteside et al, 1995) agree that, whether lower or higher limits are set, many thousands of children will be orphaned by the epidemic. There will not be significant change in the overall dependency ratio 'because the infant deaths offset, to some extent, the deaths of the economically active age groups' (Lategan, 1992: 3).

Effects on family life and household composition are and will be profound. The middle generation is in normal circumstances the stable pillar of the household, providing care and support for the older and the younger people. It has been noted how grandparents play an unusually active role in child care in South Africa. Elderly people will be relied on to play an increasing role, in both productive activities and in general household duties and the care of children. The productive role of younger children will change, with children having to leave school to care for younger siblings. Countries to the north of South Africa have reported an increased rate of earlier prostitution, with especially girl children resorting to this alternative source of income.

Researchers and social workers in the Midlands area of KwaZulu-Natal report an increase in the amount of child sexual abuse associated with the spread of HIV/ AIDS. This is understood to have at least three origins: the belief by a non-infected man that sex with a non-infected child will keep him safe from the disease; the belief by an infected man that sex with a non-infected child will cure his disease; and the internationally reported act of revenge.

Child welfare agencies associate the recent increase in foster care applications to the increasing numbers of orphaned children. They report on the formation of child-headed households, and on crèches becoming de facto hostels as the community's capacity to care for orphaned children is exhausted.

With some notable exceptions, the welfare sector has been slow to respond to HIV/ AIDS on anything like the scale required. Most energy has been expended on the rights of people with HIV/ AIDS, and on small-scale preventive work with young children and adults. Such work is to be commended, but does nothing to address the cataclysmic wave which is already here.

4 Changing welfare policy and programmes

Ministries in the new South Africa have been faced with transforming basic policy directions, at the same time as amalgamating previously racially separate administrations.

The Department of Welfare managed a widely consultative process in creating the Draft White Paper for Social Welfare (Republic of South Africa, 1996). At the heart of the Draft White Paper lie basic conceptual principles:

• that welfare will continue to be a partnership between the government and the private welfare sector
• that there will be a paradigm shift towards 'developmental social welfare'
• that social security will continue to be a central and valued part of the overall provision of welfare.

The Draft White Paper for Welfare acknowledges the uneven provision of the past. Welfare has characteristics shared by other sectors: services were skewed towards white people, and towards urban areas. The act of amalgamation of the 17 previous administrations has meant that the full extent of the biases has become clear for the first time.

The Draft White Paper for Welfare recognises the lack of national consensus on the issue of state financial support for families, and sets the scene for this Committee's investigation. At the same time it has the following to say:

The approach underlying the way forward is a broad commitment to the preservation of the family as a unit in which children are raised to healthy adulthood ... the environment best suited to meeting the primary needs of children is the family. Maintenance and foster grants are key forms of community care provision. (Republic of South Africa, 1995: 84)

The United Nations coined the term developmental social welfare in 1989. Though welfare traditionally subscribed to principles of empowerment and autonomy of clients, the new developmental social welfare seeks to invest this side of the work with meaning, and to situate the development of models within the South African context.

Social welfare is seen as one of the dimensions of social development; others are health, education, housing, land reform, and urban and rural development. In all of these other sectors, policy reforms are underway in South Africa. Most are facing the same central tension. The elections, and the constitution, have re-written the map of provision: whatever services are provided must meet the criteria of parity and equity. It has taken some time for the costs of meeting these constitutional requirements to be realised.

Within welfare more narrowly defined, there are a number of initiatives underway which seek to protect family life, and which emphasise the role of social security. A draft report of the National Programme of Action Sectoral Committee: Social Welfare listed the following among its goals:

to participate in and support all activities to improve household food security through job creation, rural development, development of women and equitable social welfare benefits to provide a safety net for vulnerable children and families; and to develop a social system that will prevent families from disintegrating. (National Programme of Action Sectoral Committee: Social Welfare, 1996: 27)

The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Young People at Risk (IMC) came into existence as a result of the chaos which ensued after more than 2 000 awaiting-trial juveniles were released or transferred into a care system which was not equipped to deal with them. It is concerned with the transformation of the 'Child and Youth Care System', i.e. 'that system which provides residential and/or community care services to young people and their families who are at risk of placement away from home, have been placed in any form of residential care, or may be in trouble with the law' (Inter-Ministerial Committee for Youth at Risk, 1996: 2. All the quotations which follow regarding youth at risk come from the same document.).

The Inter-Ministerial Committee identified the need to avoid piecemeal solutions. Among the fundamental principles it identified was that of an approach which is family-centred and emphasises family preservation and permanency planning. The idea is that work with youth at risk should be undertaken in ways which develop and build the capacity of families, and that children should where possible grow up within their own families. The state 'should take responsibility for assisting the family to provide appropriate socialisation for each child', and family support services should be given priority. Early intervention strategies should, 'where poverty is a key issue, include financial support to families in crisis combined with a programme of development and self-help'.

Where separation is unavoidable this should be within the context of a time-frame which provides for lifelong relationships within a family or community setting. Planning should from the moment of admission to care be directed towards 'preparing the young person for his or return to society'. Where a family is temporarily or permanently unable to provide materially for the child, financial or material aid would clearly be a component of the strategy to release the child from care.

A discussion document which has been compiled by the Working Committee: Prevention of Child Abuse and Protection Against Neglect is currently being circulated for comment. It brings together recommendations from a range of conferences and workshops held over recent years. The document emphasises the need for inter alia material support for families as a means of reducing the incidence of child abuse and neglect, and also the importance of access to financial aid as a means to enable mothers to remove themselves and their children from situations in which a perpetrator of child abuse is also the sole source of income for the family (Working Committee: Prevention of Child Abuse and Protection Against Neglect, 1996: 11, 13).

All of these initiatives show the Department of Welfare's commitment to caring for children within the family setting.

5 Present changes in social security regulations

The Committee undertook its work over the period when the Social Assistance Act of 1992 covering pensions and grants was beginning to be implemented. Regulations had been promulgated, and officials were being trained to implement the new system. The first applications were being accepted in May 1996.

It became apparent to the Committee fairly early in its life that incremental reform of either the old or the new system would not be financially possible, and that a major departure would be needed. Thus the Committee spent little time investigating the administrative inadequacies of the current system(s).

The implementation of the new regulations has been delayed by a major problem with integrating the information from the past separate welfare administrations into one central data-base. At the time of writing, new applications were being taken in most regions of most provinces. These could not be processed, however, because of the lack of integrated computerisation. Thus there is a bottle-neck growing in the current system which is of great concern.

6 Domestic and international commitments to the rights of women

and children

The interim Constitution of South Africa states that every child has the right to 'security, basic nutrition and basic health and social services'. The new South African Constitution (to be adopted prior to 1 January 1997) reiterates that every child has the right to 'basic nutrition, shelter, basic health services and social services'. It then goes on to make provision for the right of everyone (including children) to social security and social assistance. It says the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources to achieve the progressive realisation of these rights.

Internationally South Africa has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The former recognises the right of every child to benefit from social security, and according to the latter, the South African state has to work towards 'the continuous improvement of living conditions'. That is, there is a general prohibition against going backwards in the standard of living of people, and a core obligation to ensure minimum essential levels.

The National Programme of Action (NPA) for Children in South Africa was built on this Convention on the Rights of the Child, and outlines the steps the country will take to show its commitments to children.

The Draft White Paper on Welfare declares itself to be in line with the approach advocated by the United Nations World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995. South Africa sent a delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China in September 1995. The Minister of Health led the delegation; the then Deputy and now Minister of Welfare led the Preparatory Committee to Beijing, and has spearheaded the post-Beijing Plan of Action.

These international conventions focus on different aspects of the problem but share several central themes. Extracts from documents are reproduced in Appendix 4. They draw on materials relating to the National Programme of Action for Children in South Africa, the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen), the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing), and the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The themes may be summarised as follows:

• that women and children are particularly severely hit by poverty
• that families should be protected, in all their cultural diversity, and that men and women should take shared involvement in responsible parenthood
• that children have rights, in their own right
• that there should be equality and equity between men and women.

7 Changing economic policy

At the same time as South Africa is committing itself to these obligations, the economic policy climate is changing rapidly. After the 1994 elections, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was put forward as the new government's flagship commitment to addressing past inequalities of income, and of service provision. Its central drive was towards economic growth at the same time as towards reaching the poorest of the poor - mostly black people, in rural areas, with women and children being identified as particularly vulnerable groups.

In the two short years between April 1994 and June 1996, the macro-economic policy position changed substantially. In June the Macro-economic Strategy for Growth, Employment and Redistribution was announced. Its two main objectives are that the economy is to grow at 6% a year by the end of the century, and 300 000 or more jobs are to be created every year. Key features of this strategy are:

• enhancing international competitiveness through a stable but lower real exchange rate, and preventing its erosion through strong anti-inflationary measures
• the reduction to 3% in the ratio of the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP
• job creation as the primary source of wealth redistribution
• a more flexible approach to the labour market: not one minimum national wage, but 'appropriate standards for sectors and regions'
• promotion of small, medium and micro enterprises.

While most of the Departments have gone through their white paper processes, all have been directed to operate in the light of the macro-expenditure economic framework. The policy directives have been: do not ask for too much more; save money through more effective management and through downsizing the bureaucracy; and redistribute within the present envelope.

The declared intent of the macro-economic strategy is that it does not replace the RDP. It is also the case, however, that the previously high public profile of the RDP has diminished.

The macro-economic policy is not specific with reference to women's role in the labour market. Patterns of women's employment are changing partly in response to global competition and South Africa's greater participation in international markets. The most highly protected sectors - clothing, textiles, and leather - have had the highest degree of feminisation. The liberalisation may mean an increase in women's employment, but a growth in insecure jobs. Similarly, the Regional Industrial Development Programme, another policy instrument, has generated employment for women in rural areas, but poor quality jobs, with poor wages and conditions. Another economic policy, the General Export Incentive Scheme, will not be effective in terms of promoting the employment of women.

The commitment to gender equity in employment is apparent in the new procurement policy for state tender, which has race and gender considerations built in. This is an important potential window, as some 26% of government expenditure goes through state tender. This may be beneficial for wealthy black women individually, but not necessarily much good for women's employment generally.

8 The approach

Having surveyed the environmental context in which it was working, and having regard to its Terms of Reference, the Committee developed an approach to guide its work.

8.1 Social security needs to be understood and designed as a system in its own right, and also as one of a number of options for poverty alleviation.

Previous research done by various Committee members led to an understanding of the inter-connectedness of the various parts of the social security system itself, as well as the fact that social security needs to be seen as one of a number of alternatives in poverty alleviation, and the alternatives are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

8.2 The approach must be inter-sectoral.

The welfare sector cannot continue to take so much responsibility for the political, economic and social casualties inherited from the last regime. Synergies must be sought and alliances built with other sectors, such as labour, health, education and industry.

8.3 A focus on the child, rather than the nuclear family, in the face of changing family forms may be the best way to achieve the goal of family preservation.

The best place for a child to be is with her or his parents. The family is in transition throughout the world, and the nuclear two-generation family form is becoming less common, particularly for households in poverty. Yet many social policies do not take account of this. The Committee focused on the question: what forms of state and of other support are purported to be good for children? How can healthy adult relationships, which include responsible parenting, nurturing child care, within a home environment, be promoted?

8.4 Social spending underpins economic growth.

The Committee is aware of the need for fiscal restraint, and is also aware that investment in social spending preserves social stability for future growth. Particularly in a society of such inequality, social spending within responsible limits can promote the chances of successful growth.

8.5 The government is working with real fiscal constraints.

The Committee accepted that it was working in an economic environment of limited resources. It took as a point of departure that any recommendations which required radically larger amounts of money would in fact make the State Maintenance Grants, and indeed the broader state social security budget, even more vulnerable than it is already.

8.6 Social security is politically sensitive.

The Committee took into account the political volatility attached to the present system, and to any attempts to change it.

8.7 Administrative simplicity is centrally important in the design of social security systems.

A system needs to be simple enough to administer that the public can understand what they have to do to get access to it or why they are excluded from it. It has to be simple enough that it has sufficient legitimacy and 'do-ability' in the eyes of the officials that they consent formally and informally to administer it on its own terms.

8.8 The sound design and implementation of social security and other poverty alleviation measures hinges crucially on sound information systems.

A sound information system is central to system design where large numbers of people are being dealt with, where there is a great deal of population movement, where inter-sectoral collaboration is part of the design, and where flexibility is a necessary part of the design.

8.9 In a situation where there will be losers, transparency about what will be lost as well as what will be gained will enable changes to be implemented.

The Committee started its work knowing that whatever recommendations are made, there will be losers. When the Constitution and the macro-economic policy combine the need for equity with a commitment to curbing social spending, no 'win-win situation' is possible. The Committee's view is that it will be better to make the costs of proposed changes visible and acknowledged, and to measure up the proposed gains against the real losses that there will be.

8.10 Small unco-ordinated development initiatives find it difficult to engage in capacity-building and economic empowerment in ways that reach large numbers of people and in ways that are sustainable.

Between them, the members of the Committee had considerable experience of development projects, and could agree with the international literature which demonstrates that small-scale unco-ordinated projects may achieve good social goals, but do not reach sufficient people, and do not create sufficient sustainable independent livelihoods. At the same time, in most project or programmes, the participation of local people is important, and the building of local institutions is important, if the economic goals are to be achieved.

CHAPTER THREE     [Top]

POLICY ISSUES IN CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT

1 Introduction

Chapter One showed that a principal means of child and family support has been the maintenance grants to women and children, which formed part of a package of responses designed to protect family life. Such statutory and non-contributory forms of state support are unusual in developing countries.

The Draft White Paper on Welfare has social security as a central plank of its vision, at the same time as it signals a paradigm shift towards developmental social welfare. The intent is to provide individuals with pathways out of poverty, while ensuring that the basic needs of all are met. According to its Terms of Reference, the Committee was instructed to:

explore alternative policy options in relation to social security for children and families as well as other anti-poverty, economic empowerment and capacity building strategies.

South Africa has little social policy tradition which crosses the bridges between welfare and development. There is also very limited acquaintance with the economic and social analysis of social security. The objective of this Chapter is to provide a very brief overview of some of the themes and issues which must be taken into account when looking at policy options in the domain of welfare/ social security/ development. The themes will then be woven into Chapter Four which looks at policy alternatives. Chapter Five deals in its entirety with private parental support and responsibility.

2 Targeting

Grosh describes targeting as:

... any actions that try to concentrate benefits on the poor end of the income distribution. ... The goal of targeting is to concentrate resources on those who need them most. (Grosh, 1992: 8)

Barr (1995b) points out that targeting has two objectives. The following text summarises from his work:

Horizontal efficiency: here the concern is that benefits go to all people who need them. The chief concern is that there are gaps in coverage. The possible error is an Error of Exclusion: that people are left out of the system who should have been receiving a resource.

Vertical efficiency: here the concern is that benefits go only to those who need them. The chief concern is with leakage to non-poor groups. The possible error is an Error of Inclusion: that people are included who should have been left out of the system.

Examples from the South African context will illustrate the difference. The Old Age Pension performs relatively well in terms of horizontal efficiency: there is a high take-up rate for the pension, with the majority of pensioners who are eligible actually receiving it. It also does relatively well in terms of vertical efficiency: Ardington and Lund (1995) and le Roux (1995) show that most pensioners live in poor households.

The State Maintenance Grant is different. Research commissioned for the Committee (Vorster et al, 1996) showed that it was well-targeted to poor households in the coloured areas which were studied (vertical efficiency). The chief problem with the State Maintenance Grant is that it performs extremely badly in horizontal terms - great numbers of African people who were eligible for the grants did not receive them.

In South Africa, the chief mechanism for targeting in social security has been the Means Test. The description that follows is intended to show that there are alternatives in the field of targeting and means testing.

3 Means tests

These involve the assessment by an outsider - for example a social worker - of an individual's or family's income and assets. South Africa has considerable experience with this kind of assessment. It has been done largely by administrative staff for the pensions for elderly people, though sometimes there has been a social work assessment as well. Means testing of people with disabilities has also been done largely by administrative staff, with a district surgeon or other doctor doing the medical assessment of impairment.

All grants in the field of child and family care used to involve a trained social worker, and the assessment was meant to include an overall assessment of the mother's and child's vulnerability and living arrangements. Over time, the administration of the State Maintenance Grant has increasingly been handled by social security personnel or other administrative staff. Foster Care Grants, however, have always required extensive assessment by social workers, both home and agency visits. This involves also a cost to prospective parents of time having to be taken off work, which acts as a negative incentive for some prospective foster parents.

In the Committee's limited visits to the departments and to non-governmental organisations in the provinces, a great deal of abuse in the administration of the State Maintenance Grant was reported. Some thought it was more serious in this field than it is with the Disability Grants and the Old Age Pensions. This may be because the procedures around the State Maintenance Grants are not familiar in all administrations, things have been differently applied, and the women applying are a very vulnerable group who themselves do not know the rules, and are susceptible to working collaboratively with officials in getting the grants, with this working in the interests of both parties.

Grosh (1992) describes the large variance in Latin American programmes as to how well social worker evaluations work, largely because of the discretion which the social worker is able to exercise in interpreting rules. This is likely to be the case here in South Africa as well. Urban-based social workers acknowledge their collaboration with clients who may not qualify in terms of some criteria but are in dire financial circumstances. A common rationale used by social workers for bending the eligibility rules is that the cost to the state would be much higher if a child had to be removed from home due to the parent not being able to get a grant for support of the child. (See Table 8 for comparative costs of forms of care.)

In some countries non-social worker personnel do income assessments. Grosh (1992: 60, 61) describes the successful use of primary school teachers in Honduras to do simple means tests. Success depended on the good spread of primary schools, a characteristic shared by South Africa. The teachers spent a few days at the beginning of term identifying poor families in their area for an aid programme, with an implicit cost to the ministry of education. An alternative possibility would be to make such participation by teachers voluntary, pay them for the work, and monitor quality using mobile personnel. Thus one could design the system around the part-time effort of an army of already-employed personnel, who would exchange some of their vacation time for extra pay.

According to new health policy in South Africa, community health workers will emerge as a growing group of grassroots personnel. They may be well-positioned to assist with means testing. If there is a close synergy between forms of child support in health and welfare, this increases the role which health personnel at different levels could play.

It is sometimes suggested that 'the community' or 'the community leaders' can make informed decisions about who should be able to participate in programmes or be eligible for benefits. In South Africa's divided communities, this would have limited success. Loots and Roux (1993) reported positively on the results of selection by community committees in the relief and development programme of the Independent Development Trust. But 'communities', especially in poorer rural areas, are so greatly under the domain of traditional leaders with extensive powers of patronage that caution should be exercised in this approach. The track record of civic associations in impartial decision-making is likewise uneven.

4 Other assessment and targeting mechanisms

There are a number of other ways of assessing need and eligibility for programmes of support.

4.1 Nutritional criteria

The use of nutritional risk criteria in the programmes covered by Grosh had a good record for targeting. The South African Protein Energy Malnutrition Scheme of the 1970s used the nutritional status of children attending clinics as targeting mechanism to provide mainly skimmed milk. It may be that with the development of district health systems, and nutritional surveillance monitoring, nutritional status will be able to be used as an indicator for a number of social programmes. Nutritional status is a very complex issue, however; for example, households are to be found in South Africa in which some members are under-nourished while others are over-nourished.

4.2 Gender of household head

The gender of household head is used in some countries as a reliable indicator of poverty. Survey results show that this would not be reliable in South Africa. Though overall, households headed by women are poorer, there is great variation depending on the stage in the life cycle of the woman, and whether rural or urban areas are being considered. Ardington (1994) describes how African households in former KwaZulu which were headed by younger women in urban areas, for example, had much better all-round indicators for all household members (income, employment, educational levels, among others), than did those of households headed by men or by women in the middle and older age cohorts. Households headed by young women in rural areas were the worst off; households headed by elderly women receiving pensions were among the very poor households, even with the pension income.

4.3 Group or geographic targeting mechanisms

A group mechanism covers people within a group sharing an easily identifiable characteristic. Geographic targeting focuses on a spatial area such as a neighbourhood, or on rural areas, or on a province.

Until recently the most obvious form of group targeting in social security was the use of race in determining different scope and levels of benefits, with the most fundamental errors of both exclusion and inclusion. A contemporary example of group targeting is now the Primary School Nutrition Programme (PSNP), the Presidential Lead Project announced after the elections, which had as its objective supplying a 'breakfast snack' to all children in primary schools.

Grosh points out that geographic or group targeting is administratively simple, but correspondingly likely to be inaccurate. Given the very high levels of differentiation and inequality within rural areas and even within households, this mechanism may have limited use in South Africa.

The Fiscal and Financial Commission (1996) has developed a formula for the allocation of resources between provinces. The formula is intended to be a mechanism for overcoming the pronounced regional inequalities over time. This has elements of a geographic targeting mechanism insofar as it takes rural poverty levels into account, in addition to simple population counts.

4.4 Self-targeting mechanisms

The principle of self-selection is used in self-targeting, where individuals make the choice as to whether to apply for certain benefits or participate in certain programmes. Programmes are designed in such a way that it is only the poorest and most vulnerable who will be willing to participate in the programme. This may be achieved by setting very low wage levels for public works programmes, as happened in the drought relief programmes in South Africa; or it may be based on the provision of low quality products.

Loots and Roux (1993) evaluate the self-targeting aspects of the relief and development programmes of the IDT to have been quite successful. Women participated in large numbers relative to men, and there were instances of time-sharing in some projects.

A common problem of self-targeted public works programmes is that the quality of the product is low. This will be politically problematic if repeated here, as it will reinforce the historical trend of black people in rural areas getting poor quality products and services.

5 Incentives: the relationship between support programmes and behaviour

Programme interventions may be designed with the express intent of encouraging certain forms of behaviour. For example, the provision of nutrition supplements at a clinic might be intended to increase the numbers of mothers attending health facilities for a range of other health services, such as immunisation. It also happens that programmes designed to achieve one objective might cause concern about unintended effects of the programme.

Some commonly expressed concerns are the effects of programmes on fertility, household composition, private savings and work behaviour.

5.1 Fertility patterns

There is a deeply held popular belief that providing cash support to women will have an effect on fertility rates. Some countries have provided child benefits with the express intention of increasing the number of children per family (and this did not succeed). Many poorer countries today want to limit population growth, and the salient concern is that giving women benefits linked to child care will lead to their having more children.

The persistence of such beliefs in South Africa is surprising given that what evidence there is points in the other direction. White fertility rates have dropped in the presence of substantial state support over the years. Coloured fertility rates have dropped (although at a slower rate) in the presence of the State Maintenance Grants. African fertility rates have stayed high and are now coming down in the absence of any substantial welfare support.

Though economic demographers might hold that fertility rates are the end results of 'optimising decision-making by couples', it would seem that in South Africa, and for people in poverty, other variables are of decisive importance in determining whether to have a child (Kruger, 1996: 10). In focus interviews conducted by the Women's Health Project, female African teenagers in rural areas discussed the lack of information about reproduction, their sense of powerlessness in relationships, and peer group pressure as influencing their sexual behaviour (Barbara Klugman, personal communication). In a study of 2 000 high school children in former Transkei (Buga et al, 1996), 28.4% of the girls (as opposed to 6.4% of the boys) gave the reason for becoming engaged in sexual activity that they were 'forced by their partner' - this reason received the highest frequency of responses for girls, and was followed by 'peer group pressure' which received a further 20% of their responses (also high for boys at 17.8%).

5.2 Household composition

Does receiving social benefits encourage women to set up households independently? There is a great deal of concern in the United States of America about whether the welfare system there, in particular the social security programme Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is correlated with increasing rates of illegitimacy and increasing numbers of female headed households. Kruger reviewed the economic literature from the United States for the Committee, and found that there was no correlation:

In fact, the data indicate that, while (welfare) benefit levels have decreased since the 1970's, illegitimacy and the relative number of female-headed households have continued to increase. (Kruger, 1996: 10)

Many people would of course argue that if a welfare benefit enables a woman to leave an abusive, violent domestic relationship, this could be to the benefit of both her and her children.

With respect to elderly people, one could speculate as to whether the recent rapid increase in the size of the Old Age Pension in South Africa will reinforce the pattern of elderly people living in multi-generation households, or whether it will enable hard-pressed elderly people to leave and set up on their own. Research studies have pensioners describing how the pension gives them the right to remain in the extended family (see for example Møller and Sotshongaye, 1996). This may change now that the value of the pension has increased, though it is still too low to secure an independent living if it is a single income source.

5.3 Private savings

Some people worry about whether state-provided benefits of different sorts make it less likely that people will save some of their own money to support themselves: do public transfers crowd out private savings?

In South Africa the level of pensions and grants has been so low that there is little likelihood that this happens.

5.4 Work

A concern with social security benefits is that they may reduce the likelihood of people seeking jobs or other ways to provide for themselves. Does receiving an unemployment benefit make it less likely that a person will seek actively for further employment? Does receiving a State Maintenance Grant for herself and two children make a woman less likely to take up work opportunities?

In a country with such high unemployment rates, a simplistic answer to this question is: 'but there are no jobs to be had anyway'. This is so, but labour market patterns are changing internationally, with more and more people (especially poorer people) making their own jobs, or engaging in a range of productive activities, some waged and some unwaged, to put together a living. South African wages for women, and for women in small towns and rural areas, are so low that the value of the State Maintenance Grant may commonly be higher than the lowest local wage. As Kruger puts it:

... it is certainly a perverse situation where those outside the labour force can do so well relative to those participating in the labour market. (Kruger, 1996: 9)

6 Costs

A simple rule guiding the design of support programmes is that the cost of administering the programme needs to be held down relative to the benefit or resource being delivered. A corollary of this is that, the smaller the benefit, the greater the proportionate cost of delivering it. There is a cut off point at which the costs of delivery of a benefit are so high relative to the benefit that the system is simply not worth it. A difficulty is that there is usually a poor quality of cost data.

7 Administrative capacity

A factor which is frequently overlooked in programme design is that the best programme will fail if there is insufficient administrative capacity to carry it out. Lack of capacity may refer for example to insufficient staff, poorly trained staff and lack of transport and communications.

One may also find a situation where the capacity is there in terms of staff numbers and levels of competence, but there is a perceived lack of legitimacy or fairness about the system being implemented, and therefore an unwillingness to apply the system efficiently. This was certainly the case with regard to the administration of the means test in a number of the former administrations serving African people: the means test was ignored or subverted, especially with regard to the Old Age Pension (Lund, 1992).

8 The locus of control over the scope and level of benefits

One of the commitments of the new government has been to overcome the regional inequalities which exist in South Africa. Some provinces are far poorer than others, and have less scope for economic growth in the short term.

There is little understanding of the poverty alleviation role played by the social security system, and allowing provincial discretion as to levels carries a risk of undermining this effective measure of poverty alleviation.

9 Conclusion

This Chapter has reviewed, very briefly, some of the issues which arise when various options for purposive intervention programmes are considered. There are no blueprints for programmes, and the various elements, such as those outlined above, will interlock and have effects in intended and unintended ways. Real people in really poor circumstances behave in ways which surprise academic theorists. Countries may have the technical capacity to deliver, but lack the political will. Highly innovative programmes may be created but if there is no administrative depth, the programmes will not be implemented, or will be subverted.

CHAPTER FOUR    [Top]

POLICY OPTIONS IN CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT

1 Introduction

There are currently many anti-poverty initiatives which focus on women and children. Some of these are hailed as developmental alternatives to social security. The Committee's view is that alternative programmes should be seen as complementary systems, providing opportunities for inter-sectoral collaboration, and enhancing the developmental side of social welfare. There are no perfect social engineering programmes, and in all of them, certain trade-offs are made, by design, or in implementation. For a number of reasons many of the alternatives do not have the success record that social security has of reaching the poorest households. In describing the options, they should be considered for their value as part of a multi-pronged approach to alleviating the effects of poverty on all people, in particular on children and women.

In the visits to the provinces, both department staff and people from welfare organisations were asked what the potential was, where the windows of opportunity were, for developmental social welfare, and for linking social security with development. Although the visits to the provinces were very short, it was nevertheless encouraging to see the energy that had been put into trying to operationalise the developmental social welfare shift, and to give effect to the suggestions for linking social security, social services and opportunities for skills training for clients which were contained in the Draft White Paper on Welfare. The Committee was obviously not able, in the time at its disposal, to do a thorough assessment of project and programme potential.

2 Parental maintenance through the judicial system

South Africa has a judicial maintenance system which is based on the fundamental value that parents are responsible for the financial support of their children. Before applying for a State Maintenance Grant, a parent must show proof that s/he is not able to secure support from the other parent through the magistrate's courts.

Chapter 5 deals exclusively with parental maintenance. Here it is sufficient to note that the system functions so poorly that the government is unwittingly signalling that financial responsibility by parents for their children is not the main option for child support.

3 Nutrition interventions

Millions of young children the world over are under-nourished. Such children are vulnerable to early death from what should be minor diseases. If children under 5 do not receive adequate nutrition, their human potential may be diminished for all time - both their intellectual and physical capacities.

Figure 1 in Chapter 1 showed the stunting rates of South Africa's children. The nutritional status of South Africa's children lags far behind that of children in countries with similar levels of economic development. An improvement in nutrition would be a very effective investment in tomorrow's human resource potential. South Africa's recent experience of nutrition interventions seem to contain a paradox. Put simply, and at the risk of over-simplification: those that succeed in going to scale reach children too late, with the wrong sorts of nutrition; those that succeed in reaching children early, involving mothers and communities in the intervention, are small and cannot be duplicated on the scale required to make a national difference. Middle level programmes are susceptible to inefficiency and corruption.

Pinstrup-Andersen et al (1995) give an extensive review of recent international experience with nutrition interventions. Their international experience coincides with local South African experience which suggests that what young children need is a period of breast-feeding, followed by a period of getting small amounts of food frequently during the day and night. Programmes work best when they involve mothers in education, when the nutritional intervention is linked to other local initiatives, and when there is a close feedback loop between a change in the mother's behaviour, change in the nutritional status of the child, and the response of the programme. A programme such as Philani in Cape Town links its success on the nutrition front with the development of income-generating opportunities for mothers and other women. Such projects, however, tend to be the outcome of a particular combination of circumstances at a local level at one time, such as the degree of community organisation, leadership, the presence or absence of other health services, etc.

At the other end of the spectrum is a major national initiative such as the Presidential Lead Project - the Primary Schools Nutrition Programme. Announced shortly after the election, its rationale was that many of South Africa's children attended school, but could not concentrate on lessons as they had insufficient food at home before leaving for school, or after the long walk to school. Within months, this programme reached hundreds of thousands of South African primary school children, providing a simple snack and drink.

The programme has had uneven success across provinces. It has been controversial, with some saying that nutritional interventions should concentrate on the earlier years before primary school, and others countering that the primary school programme does good anyway: teachers report that children are visibly more alert; it heightens the public consciousness about the importance of nutrition.

The shorter the distance between the provision of a nutrition supplement and the young child in its own home, the greater the chances that the food will reach the child, and will be consumed. Reaching directly into households is administratively difficult and costly where people in rural areas are not settled in villages, as is the case for large parts of South Africa. In this respect South Africa is unlike many other developing countries.

In another respect, too, South Africa is in a different position in relation to nutrition provision. In some countries, nutrition is provided at clinics in an effort to encourage mothers or caregivers to interact with the health services. In South Africa, it appears that on the whole mothers or caregivers will go to a clinic if it is there.

4 Free health care

There is much to recommend a close relationship between primary health and primary welfare delivery on the ground. In developing country situations, basic development indicators for welfare are much the same as those for health, and this is so for urban as well as for rural areas. Where welfare services fail, or are absent altogether, clients in great need will fall back on health services, and vice versa. In considering the package of care for children and families, the Committee reviewed current changes in health policy.

One of the chief concerns in child care continues to be that so many of South Africa's children die of diseases that are readily preventable. And, while there is a high rate of contact with the health services just before or around the time of child birth, many children, and particularly poor children, 'disappear' from contact with the health services soon after birth, and fail to get the immunisations which are a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to counteract infections, and lifelong impairment.

An early announcement by President Mandela after the elections was that all health care for pregnant women and children under the age of 6 would be free. No budget was specifically set aside for the free health care (FHC) programme; provinces were expected to re-prioritise within existing envelopes. In mid-1995, the University of Cape Town's Child Health Unit co-ordinated an evaluation of the new programme for the Health Systems Trust (McCoy, 1996). This is the only national study known of to date which attempts to assess the scope, perceptions and costs of the new programme. The report's main findings which have relevance to this Committee are summarised here.

The policy led to a rise in the attendance of patients at most public sector health facilities, There was an increase in attendance at ante-natal clinics, and an increase in the number of women booking for ante-natal care. This was one of the hoped for outcomes of the FHC programme: that mothers-to-be would plan their attendance at the correct facility, rather than hope to get care, with no advance warning, from an inappropriate facility such as a tertiary care hospital.

Opponents of the policy expressed concern that free health care would encourage women to become pregnant. These concerns were not supported by the study. It found that family planning attendance had increased at most facilities since the implementation of the policy, and there was no evidence of a rise in the number of deliveries.

The study tapped perceptions of both users and providers of the service. Views of users were that access to health care has improved, especially for people living in rural areas, informal settlements and on white-owned farms. Concern was expressed about the ability of the service to sustain itself. Providers, though they agreed in principle with the policy, felt that it had aggravated a number of existing problems with health services. Problems mentioned were poor working conditions and low pay, a shortage of medicines, overcrowding and poor staff morale.

With reference to the preventive aspect of the service, the majority of providers felt that it helped prevent serious illness or death among pregnant women and children under 6. They also felt, however, that the health services needed additional expenditure in order to cope with the increased utilisation, and in order to improve the quality of their service.

The vehicle for the implementation of the FHC policy is the District Health Service. This is unevenly developed across the provinces as yet. Once in place, it should increase the chance of integrated service delivery close to where the majority of people live.

5 Support for early childhood development

The Early Childhood Development (ECD) field is relevant to the Committee's work on a number of counts. The sector employs an increasing number of women, but levels of pay are low. There is some formal employment of professional teachers, and many related jobs for cooks, play supervisors, maintenance workers, and so on. Skills training gets conducted through ECD centres, and the field holds potential for developmental social welfare. At the same time numerous studies show the importance of grandmothers in providing care for children, sometimes in informal neighbourhood centres. Older people receiving pensions frequently cite crèche fees as one of their routine monthly expenses.

There has been a great deal of recent research activity in the ECD field (see for example Balie, 1993; Kimaryo, 1993; Lategan, 1992; Liddell and Kemp, 1991; Naidoo et al, 1996; Padayachie et al, 1994). Estimates of the number of children in early childhood facilities appear to fall back on 1991 figures presented in a 1992 National Education Policy Initiative report. The studies agree that there are slightly over half a million South African pre-school age children in some form of formal or informal early childhood facility. This means that about 90% of such children have no access to ECD services. Past government support for ECD shows the familiar racial bias, with the average annual expenditure for a white child being R1 684, compared to R38 for a black child (Padayachie et al, 1994, quoting figures from the 1992 National Education Policy Initiative report.)

The ECD sector has agreed that the age definition for early childhood development is birth to 9 years old. The reception year (a planned first year of the 10 compulsory and free years of education) is currently receiving attention as the likely focus of the ECD subsidy. There is a risk that this will detract attention from the need to provide support during a child's earliest years. A reception year subsidy would go to 5 and 6 year olds. In the three year ECD pilot project implemented by the national Department of Education, the child subsidy is conditional on younger children being provided with a service of some sort, that is, younger children may not be excluded from the community-based ECD service in order to accommodate more 5 and 6 year olds. This condition has been included to protect the younger children.

There is critical debate in the sector on appropriate forms of provision and the ability of the state to pay. The debate ranges from a schooling/centre-based focus to a home-based focus, with those in the middle looking for a combination of both. A complicating factor in this debate is that the term 'centre-based' is loosely used. It may refer to a room tacked onto a rural homestead, a room in a house in a township or settlement area, part of a church or community centre, a formal ECD centre or a classroom attached to a school.

The ECD pilot project focuses on subsidies for community-based ECD services with training being a primary condition of the subsidy. It is envisaged that the sites for the pilot project will be varied, but that they will be geared towards poor communities. The pilot project aspires to straddle the debate by developing alternative models for provision. It is looking for ways to provide a service that meets the needs of children in the reception phase of ECD within a community-based framework. The focus of the pilot project is an interim conditional accreditation of ECD practitioners.

All the provinces have come on board the pilot project. Gauteng has chosen to explore a home-based focus based on the 'Columbian Model' which differs from the rest in that it does not focus on the accreditation and training of ECD practitioners. It is also seen as a more cost-effective model of provision. The essence of the model is a low cost, mass-based facility which relies on existing homes, using and building on existing neighbourhood and family provision. Women from the community volunteer to be housemothers, and a small parent fee is paid. The government provides food, training and elementary health services. Community motivators provide the training and encouragement and monitoring necessary (information drawn from Naidoo et al, 1996: 28).

The ECD sector has the potential to employ thousands of women. People in all of the provinces mentioned the possible synergy between welfare and ECD, and some innovative work was being done in training people in crèche management, and child development. The National Labour and Economic Development Institute (NALEDI) argues that if 75% of children were in ECD facilities with a staff to child ratio of 1: 20, then some 207 000 jobs would be created for teachers and childminders. They argue also that multiplier effects would be generated locally by the need for catering and equipment (Naidoo et al, 1996).

The potential for both child development and for job creation will be determined to a large degree on the ability of the national Department of Education to pay for the reception year, and then by the success of the pilot project. The outcome of the accreditation debate will also have an impact on the potential for employment opportunities.

6 Public works programmes

In the transitional period of 1990 to 1994, much energy went into learning about and formulating public works programmes as a central plank of the coming Reconstruction and Development Programme. They were the subject of debate in the National Economic Forum, with business, labour and government negotiating the terms on which this major thrust would take place.

Core principles agreed on were that the programmes:

• would be labour intensive
• would concentrate on delivering basic infrastructure such as roads and water into particularly rural areas, to facilitate future growth of markets and services
• would not be viewed as a strategy to tackle long term unemployment
• could therefore offer wage rates lower than the national minimum
• would include an element of skills training
• and would include community participation.

The Independent Development Trust (IDT) was allocated some R70 million of the R250 million made available to the Department of Public Works. Figures collected by Valodia from the Department of Public Works show that after a slow start, the IDT-related programmes scored some success in 1994/95. Some 3.7 million labour days were provided, at an average rate of R9.64 per day, in 487 projects. Participation rates by women ranged from 36% to 49% across the provinces, with an average of 41% (Valodia, forthcoming). This performance is relatively good by international standards, but nevertheless not as high as had been planned for these particular programmes. An evaluation of earlier IDT programmes (Loots and Roux, 1993) also showed their effectiveness, if measured by their own objectives i.e. not as long term employment creation programmes, but for the short term building of publicly needed infrastructure.

Valodia also points out that the programmes have important effects on women in that projects such as electrification and water reticulation will directly and significantly reduce the amounts of time they spend on these routine household chores.

South African experience of these programmes to date suggest that:

• participants do not complain about 'workfare' when they receive cash or food in return for work
• it is possible though not easy to keep the schemes labour intensive; water provision is especially difficult to deliver through labour intensive means
• it is possible to involve women
• where women get involved, child care is not a priority concern: the kinds of households which choose to participate in Public Works Programmes contain other unemployed and under-employed adults who can look after children
• it is possible to involve local communities in decisions about time-sharing, wage-sharing, and gender participation.

The Department of Welfare placed some faith in being able to refer applicants for social security, and for other social services, to the Public Works Programmes. It seems, however, that the popularity and prevalence of such works is waning. No new money for the Public Works Programmes was allocated in the 1995/96 budget.

This would seem to be a missed opportunity, after so many academics and development experts visited so many countries, learned so much, and developed a realistic enthusiasm for the potential of the programmes in a time of transformation.

If Public Works Programmes were to regain popularity and funding, it should be noted that they are not a direct alternative to State Maintenance Grants. The labour days per person offered on the programmes are limited - probably not more than 60 per person per programme. Public Works Programmes are by definition temporary in any one locality. Children support is needed for longer than that. However, to the extent that such programmes have a skills component, and, in rural areas, expose women to other opportunities as well through the interaction that takes place around the work, they are a useful avenue of support.

7 Income generating projects and small, micro and medium enterprises

Social welfare has been involved in income generation in a number of ways. Some organisations derive fees for services for such activities as counselling (typically, in the organisations involved in substance abuse), and hold that payment by clients positively and actively affects the therapeutic programme. Others have enabled clients to generate incomes for themselves in a collective setting such as sheltered workshops for people with physical or intellectual disabilities.

Income generation in the more accepted sense of the term has been more in the domain of those practising community development, with the latter often practising in development rather than welfare organisations. There have been some successes. There are however many more examples of projects being invested with significant skills, resources and time, but not producing marketable goods, or operating in an area where there are no markets, or not knowing where the markets are, and not being sustainable. These projects become unco-ordinated and expensive subsidised welfare programmes which may be fulfilling a social function, but are not leading to the economic independence which is the objective of the projects themselves.

Some new initiatives which came to the notice of the Committee hold promise of being more efficient and effective. A welfare organisation in Mpumalanga, for example, was having difficulty marketing the goods produced by its clients, and noticed that most other income-generating projects in the area had the same problem. They formed an umbrella body specifically to see whether there could be economies of scale in a joint venture, while retaining organisational autonomy. Many of the welfare organisations have referred clients to the Labour Department's Skills Academy in the provinces.

Following the White Paper on Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise Development, the Department of Trade and Industry has set up NEPA, the Nsika Enterprise Promotion Agency, as its arm for implementation of the small business policy. The Targeted Assistance Programme within NEPA has as its special target what it perceives as the weakest groups: women, people with disabilities, and others with special needs. This appears to be the weakest part of NEPA, with no plans of action on the table.

Some have expressed doubts as to whether an SMME policy can impact on the poverty and employment position experienced by women. The lesson for SMME success seems to be that it succeeds if it aims at the medium to small enterprise business which already shows potential: with some access to training, technology and information, the enterprise can become independent and grow. The lesson is the same as that proposed in the present macro-economic policy: choose what is already being done competently, and develop it. This is not encouraging for the development and support of the really small survivalist sector in which many women are engaged. This suggests the need for a robust safety net for women so that children too can be supported.

A potential opportunity exists in the new network of local business service centres being promoted by the Department of Trade and Industry. Services needed by small businesses - training, technology and information - are concentrated in one centre. If goals are met, courses will be accredited, quality control will be assured, and the services will be monitored. The centres are set up in response to local initiative and request; non-governmental organisations and local governments have so far been active in catalysing some of the approximately 150 that have been set up to date.

Welfare organisations could well explore associating with such agencies and carving out a niche for their clients in the development of local business.

8 The Flagship Programme for Unemployed Women with Children 0 - 5

The Department of Welfare has created a pilot programme aimed at providing unemployed women and their young children with an opportunity to break out of poverty.

The Department earmarked R3 million for nine projects, one in each province, with an allocation of about R2 000 per year per family. A variety of projects will be financed, each providing an economic opportunity to about 120 women in a targeted area. In total, more than 1 000 women will benefit from this initiative. Projects will include activities such as farming, garment-making, and home building, and are designed to create profits that will be reinvested in the community in an effort to build up the economy of that region. Other departments will be expected to make a contribution: for example Labour, through the costs of training for women; Housing, through capital subsidies; and Health, through nutrition programmes.

The intention is that providing impoverished women with an opportunity to develop skills and become economically active will ensure self reliance and remove the need for state grants. As these mothers rise above their situation they will take with them their dependants and so begin to break the vicious cycle of poverty.

The Flagship Programme shows the Department piloting the new approach of developmental social welfare. It recognises that the eradication of poverty requires an integrated approach, and thereby sets as a key performance indicator the formation of inclusive stakeholder groups. These have included non-governmental organisations and other government departments. Together they have assisted in the planning of the project and will monitor its progress. This integrated planning has seen maximum use of government resources, thus eliminating duplication of services and establishing partnership in service delivery.

The Programme hopes to ensure that vulnerable families will not only be provided with economic independence, but will also have access to support services such as health care and education, skills training, and literacy training.

On the 30 July 1996 the first project, the Babinachuene Women's Multipurpose Project, was launched in collaboration with the Northern Province Department of Health and Welfare. Women will develop a viable vegetable farm in this agricultural project. It is planned that all other provinces will have projects launched before the end of 1996, with each project reflecting local needs and opportunities. The Flagship Programme is designed to demonstrate that intersectoral collaboration - joint planning and implementation - is necessary to attack poverty and empower marginalised sectors in society.

This Programme is larger than other initiatives taken on by the Department of Welfare, and its market and rural orientation make it an important experiment to watch. It has particular salience for State Maintenance Grants, as a testing ground for how feasible it is to switch numbers of women from one programme of support to another. Unfortunately, the Flagship Programme itself could not design any of its projects specifically with the needs of Maintenance Grants beneficiaries in mind, as this would have involved a 'double subsidy' of particular individuals.

9 The social welfare/ social security link

A number of provincial departments had taken seriously the suggestion in the Draft White Paper on Welfare to forge active links between social security and social welfare services. Indeed, some initiatives may well have pre-dated the White Paper process. They are doing this in the face of the acknowledged tension that is commonly found between social security and social work staff.

Examples of the variety of methods being used are:

• A post has been allocated specifically to an information officer, whose task it is to inform pensioners of their rights as well as their responsibilities. One telephone line has been dedicated as a helpline.
• A social worker sits with social security staff when applications are being taken. The social worker refers, where appropriate, to training opportunities, or alternative sources of support, when these are available.
• Senior social security positions have been filled with professional social workers, in the hope that they will be in a position to integrate the social security and social service aspects of provision.

It would seem that further opportunities would be opened up if both social security and social work staff decided to work practically on the development of a programme for specific clients.

10 Initiatives by social workers in government departments and in welfare organisations

There was much evidence of social workers putting an effort into making the switch to developmental social welfare. Practical examples which were given of some of the new programmes were:

• getting street children back into school
• life skills and assertiveness training against child abuse
• management skills for crèche workers
• training in child care for home based carers.

These activities have demanded a substantial change of mind set for many people. They are fundamental to developmental social welfare, but in the short term they are themselves not the lever that can switch people to economic empowerment. They are, at their best, a necessary condition, so that people are more securely placed when opportunities come their way. These opportunities may be access to training programmes, or public works schemes, or small businesses. But they are not a sufficient condition, and on the whole the sufficient conditions will not be able to be provided by the welfare department on its own.

Some initiatives were tackling the problem of scale. Most notable was the group in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal who are attempting to design an affordable way of tackling the traumatic effects of AIDS on children and families in the area, in a way that sees government as an important but by no means the sole source of support (Pietermaritzburg Summit on Children in Distress, 1996). They envisage a 'four tier catchnet', a progression of layers of care from inside the child's own extended family through to institutional care for a few. The model hinges around the support of community-based motivators who identify pockets of need, and attempt to lever resources from different levels of society. Local government is seen as having a critical role to play as co-ordinator of the overall effort.

There is enterprising activity in the movements for people with disabilities, adults as well as children. There were initiatives in some provinces to place individuals in employment, and these are important as pilots, and to test where the opportunities are in industry. In one province the disabled people's movement had won the premier's commitment to an active labour market policy in the civil service for people with disabilities. This is a good example of tackling institutions, and going to scale. It should see direct benefits to the government in terms of reducing dependency on the Disability Grant.

An imaginative idea was for government to reward industry, at no additional cost to itself, for placing a person with a Disability Grant in full time employment for one year. The grant could provide a 'subsidy' for the award. Such a move would of course have to be negotiated with Disabled People of South Africa and other such interest groups.

11 Corporate sector partnerships

Corporate social responsibility funding in the past has concentrated more on education and development, and little interest has been shown in traditional welfare activities. Such funding has built numbers of training centres, and provided bursaries, but has not, for example, sponsored many old age homes.

There is reported to be growing corporate support for child development, possibly related to the popularity of the President's Children's Fund, and the high profile accorded to the National Programme of Action for Children. This might be a fertile field for developing new partnerships between welfare and industry.

In provinces with strong industrial bases, sponsorship of welfare-related activities could

be explored, and in particular where workers' interests are involved and/ or have been neglected in the past. It remains the case, however, that provinces in which poverty is especially deep, such as Northern Province and Eastern Cape, have currently limited or declining industrial bases, and the potential for corporate sector-welfare partnerships is thus constrained.

12 Social funds

The interest in social funds in South Africa at present stems from two different sources - from the World Bank with its experience of Emergency Social Funds, and from non-governmental organisations calling for community social funds.

The Bank's Emergency Social Funds were an acknowledgement of the negative short term effects of structural adjustment on many poor people. They were designed as a bridging mechanism of support, supposedly until the positive effects of economic growth policies reached the poor. The Funds had somewhat different objectives in different countries, but generally focused on building economic and social infrastructure, providing social services, and credit schemes.

Khadiagala did a review for the World Bank of the Funds' performance in different countries. She cites the unique features of the project design of the Funds to be that they could be institutionally autonomous from, though close to government. In this, they provided an opportunity to experiment with new institutional procedures close to government. They were financing mechanisms with no implementing role, and they relied on non governmental organisations and community organisations to drive the demand for funding (Khadiagala, 1995; also Graham, 1994; Subbarao et al, 1995.)

The strengths of the funds were that they could provide rapid and flexible financing, and they provided a low cost, low risk opportunity for public sector reform.

Their main limitations were serious, if the overriding goal is for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. They were limited in their ability to focus on the very poor. There was a trade-off between reaching the poor and achieving high rates of community participation. They had limited success in targeting women; Graham (1994) analyses the Bolivian Emergency Social Fund, one of the 'success stories' and she also describes limits to the participation of women. The Funds typically had problems with financing recurrent costs, and there was a poor quality of outputs owing to difficulties with supervision.

These limitations to Social Funds of the World Bank variety would seem to be serious in the South African context. The Reconstruction and Development Programme could be construed as South Africa's own indigenous form of Emergency Social Fund, though it was too integrated within government to be strictly comparable.

In South Africa the call for some kind of community social fund is probably linked to the decrease in national and international support for non-governmental organisations and community based organisations. The need has been perceived to collaborate in levering funds. One of the pieces of research commissioned for the Committee (Haarmann and Haarmann (1996)) strongly advocated that if the State Maintenance Grant continues, part of it should be earmarked for a local community fund, even at an initial low level. The impact of development projects financed from these funds should be monitored, and if successful, more could be made available in time.

On the one hand local control over development funding should be promoted, and people are more likely to collaborate and organise where there are resources at stake. However, programmatic community social funds (i.e. designed as a national programme, and not limited to initiatives in a few specific communities) depend either on strong local government, or on strong and evenly developed civic organisations. South Africa has neither of these at present.

As to the suggestion that part of the State Maintenance Grant should be earmarked to provide the basis for a community social fund: the advice from people with broad international experience was not to confuse such development funding with social security. This view was shared by the majority of the Committee. Moreover, to earmark part of a small benefit which goes by definition to the very poor could be seen as 'imposing a development tax on the poor'.

13 Conclusion

Welfare cannot by definition primarily be a job creation programme. It itself is a low wage sector, depending a lot on the use of volunteers. If developmental social welfare is allowed by default or by intent to take responsibility for economic empowerment at any significant scale, and if this is then used as the rationale for cutting back on social security or on the further development of social services, the work of social workers will become intolerable, and the welfare sector will be an active contributor to what appear to be ever-deepening inequalities in South African society.

The alternative programmes and policies which could have an influence on children in poverty should be seen as extremely valuable complements to the social security system. They are not alternatives, but can be part of a multi-pronged strategy for intervention. Such a multi-pronged strategy means that the welfare sector's own professional work must be re-oriented. It requires a central commitment to inter-sectoral work with other departments, such as Labour, Trade and Industry, Land and Agricultural Affairs, Justice, Education and Health, to name a few.

CHAPTER FIVE    [Top]

THE PRIVATE MAINTENANCE SYSTEM

1 Introduction

The second Term of Reference of the Committee was:

to investigate the possibility of increasing parental financial support through the private maintenance system.

Before a person applies for a State Maintenance Grant, she must show proof that she has tried to get financial support for herself and/or for her child(ren) through the judicial or private maintenance system.

This private maintenance system is within the domain of the Department of Justice. The Committee had to appraise fairly intensively the work done by another Department, because to the extent that the judicial maintenance system does not work, it has a direct and costly impact on the Department of Welfare.

The Hansard record of debates on the Justice budget in the National Assembly and Senate provide evidence of fairly widespread concern among politicians about the shortcomings of the system, as well as a commitment on the part of the Minister of Justice and former Deputy Minister of Justice to address these. The Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Justice expressed great interest in any proposals which would come from this Committee. The Committee knew that many human rights, legal rights and other non- governmental organisations shared the concern to improve the system. There is general agreement that the major problem is to do with administration, rather than defects of the law.

The Committee played the role of collating research into the problems with the system, reviewing international literature for shared problems and better models of practice, interviewing key stakeholders and assessing what they thought the most pressing needs for change were, and then hosting a workshop at which stakeholders were brought together to agree on a way forward. The recommendations of the Committee are thus the outcome of a negotiated process.

This Chapter outlines the problems as identified by magistrates, lawyers, non governmental organisations, and researchers. It then describes the major themes which arise in any discussions of parental maintenance systems, but places them within the South African context. It concludes with recommendations for change.

2 The problem

It is widely acknowledged that the parental maintenance (child support) system in South Africa is in disarray. A great many children are being brought up by single parents. The non-custodial parent rarely contributes to their upkeep, despite a legal obligation to do so. Some non-custodial parents are unable to contribute because they are unemployed and lack the resources themselves. Very many others are able to contribute, but do not do so. Custodial parents who manage to secure payments do so only at great cost in terms of both money and time to themselves.

The awards are often at an extremely low level. Burman's work in the late 1980s, which is the most extensive analysis to date, found that awards in respect of 62 (31.7%) of the 197 children covered in her Western Cape study were below the Household Subsistence Level (HSL). The HSL is itself at a level which is already inadequate. Awards for 22 of the children were less than even the lower Primary HSL figure. Nevertheless, given the widespread poverty in the society and the low level of state assistance, even these amounts would make a difference to the lives of the children concerned were they paid on a regular basis.

During the apartheid era parental maintenance applications were handled by the different own affairs departments. African applicants were handled through Home Affairs. Since 1994 these functions have been handed over to Justice in many areas. However in some areas (Bloemfontein, Goodwood, Grahamstown, Mitchells Plain, Pinetown, Pretoria North and Randburg), African applicants must still apply at Home Affairs rather than at the central offices. Some coloured applicants - at least in some areas of Cape Town - go first to the local welfare department.

In Parliament the Minister gave a lack of suitable accommodation as a reason for this ongoing racial separation. Meanwhile, he said, he had "called for all offices to handle maintenance complaints without consideration of race or colour". At the ground level the perception is that there is still clear discrimination.

The Black Sash reports that the system is in such disarray that many women are now abandoning attempts to secure parental maintenance and are immediately applying for state maintenance grants. They do this despite Black Sash advice that their applications are almost sure to fail. This is a further indication of the inadequacy of the current parental maintenance system.

Common problems are identified below.

2.1 Attitudes within the legal fraternity and the Justice Department towards maintenance

The problems with maintenance have been apparent for a long time. Over the years some magistrate's courts have introduced reforms of different types. Many are piecemeal, and some are implemented only for certain race groups. Even where the reforms have some success, there appears to be little sharing of experience and ideas.

Perhaps the most serious problems are (a) the shortage of resources in terms of personpower and finances allocated to the maintenance system and (b) the lack of status, importance or urgency seemingly attributed to the matter by the justice system as a whole. The second point impacts on the first, in that if maintenance were accorded greater priority, it might also be granted more resources.

This lack of attention and resources means among other things that there is still effective apartheid in the maintenance system. In many, if not most, areas women of different race groups are treated differently. In some cases it seems Justice is reluctant to take over the files and poor administration of other departments. In some cases it seems that there are concerns by both Justice and other departments as to the implications of hand-over given talk of 'right-sizing' of the civil service.

At least part of the problem is that maintenance is very different from most other issues dealt with by the courts. An ex-magistrate with extensive experience in maintenance matters commented on some of the contradictions which emerge when issues like maintenance are dealt with by legal people, through legal methods:

The legal fraternity as a whole (with a few exceptions), and in particular the Department of Justice, battle to convince themselves that maintenance and related matters should be treated with the same respect as other judicial processes, and prefer to view it from the perspective of 'a welfare issue'. This is not to imply that welfare issues are of less importance, but simply reflects the realities of having legally trained and factually inclined people being unable to relate to the additional social and emotional demands of these procedures, and therefore preferring not to get involved beyond that which is absolutely necessary.

Attorneys, prosecutors and magistrates alike, are of the belief that they are wasting their talents and time in the Maintenance Court ... It has been my experience that, as a result of the impression created by senior officials and possibly (albeit inadvertently) by the Department itself, that maintenance enquiries are not really difficult or important, few ambitious and capable prosecutors or magistrates wish to be part of these proceedings ... Combine this with the prospect of the typical 'legal personality' being required to enter into a more personal and emotional field, and the result is that officials moreover have to be compelled to work at the Maintenance section - often to serve as a quid pro quo for some mistake they have made in another section. (personal communication)

2.2 Statistics

The Department of Justice does not keep statistics as to the number of maintenance cases. In answer to a question in Parliament in mid-1996, the Department noted that obtaining this information would "mean that each and every magistrate's office in the Republic will have to be contacted and it will take the personnel weeks to gather the necessary information. Such an exercise will therefore not only be time consuming but will also not be economically feasible".

Some magistrate's offices collect the statistics for their own internal management purposes but it is not known how many do so. Several of the larger magistrate's offices - Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Bloemfontein - have computerised the payments side of parental maintenance, and should therefore be able to provide statistics on this limited aspect. Parts of the Western Cape inherited a networked computerised system from the former House of Representatives. This system covered Athlone, Bellville, Mitchells Plain, Port Elizabeth and Wynberg. It is no longer networked, but still operates on a stand-alone basis at each of these offices. The Western Cape system is the only one which covers applications as well as payments, and therefore provides fuller statistics.

The statistics below come from the Western Cape computer records for the sixteen month period 1 January 1995 to 30 April 1996. All these cases, most of which would have involved more than one visit, were handled by only three clerks at each office.

Table 3: Parental maintenance statistics, Western Cape, 01.01.95 - 30.04.96

Source: Analysis by Debbie Budlender

Table 3 shows there were more than 13 000 new cases over this 16 month period. Of existing cases where an application was made to increase or decrease the amount being paid monthly, it can be seen that far more decreases (2 603) were granted than were increases (372).

There are further sporadic statistics from other offices. Thus Fair Lady magazine reported that the Johannesburg maintenance court, the biggest in the country, summonsed 708 people for failing to pay maintenance over a two-month period in 1993 and dealt with an average of 6 000 maintenance matters each month (Marshall, 1994). In 1995 Sheila Camerer, former Deputy Minister of Justice, reported that there were approximately 19 000 maintenance files on record in Johannesburg, 13 000 in Durban, and 6 500 in Pretoria. She reported that Johannesburg was dealing with 250 to 300 people a day. The numbers are almost certainly now higher given the ongoing amalgamation of the previously racially divided administrations.

Even where payments are computerised, there are no records as to default, because not all payments are made through the court. Burman and McLennan (1994) state that the existing research shows that a high default rate does not appear to be linked to the proportion of income which the non-custodial parent is ordered to pay.

2.3 Computerisation

According to the Minister of Justice, maintenance systems are at present in use at magistrates offices in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Wynberg, Athlone, Mitchells Plain, Bellville and Port Elizabeth (response to question in Parliament by MP Mary Turok). The Minister also indicated that specifications to revise the present computer system/s have been drafted and are awaiting approval. On approval of these specifications, they will be inviting tenders for the development and implementation of a revised system. They hope to begin implementing the new system in the current financial year. For financial reasons the system will initially be implemented in Chief Magistrates' offices only.

During the research for this report it emerged that Wynberg, Athlone, Mitchells Plain, Bellville and Port Elizabeth are currently running different - and more comprehensive - systems than the other computerised offices. The other offices have systems which were developed by the national Department of Justice and which deal only with finances i.e. with money collected by the court from non-custodial parents and paid out to the custodians. The more comprehensive system was developed for the House of Representatives in the Cape Province. It covers both finances and the original complaints in respect of parental maintenance.

The ex-Cape Province system was unique in that all the offices concerned were networked. This meant that the non-custodial parent could pay in at any of the offices, and the custodial parent could be paid out at any office. It meant that when the computer at one office was down, staff could phone another office and get correct information. It meant that the programmer - from her central office - could update programmes, investigate problems and put many of them right long distance, and therefore much more quickly. It meant that the programmer controlled and took responsibility for backing up the whole system.

The system was impressive. It seemed to cover all eventualities (e.g. reversing payments to incorrect people, computing statistics, printing out warning letters to non-payees, transfers from one office to another, calculating arrears and interest, etc.). What was also evident was that the programmer had liaised closely with the users - maintenance clerks and officers - in designing the system. The latter personnel had, on an ongoing basis, requested new and amended features which suited their way of working. The system was thus able to serve users' needs as well as possible, given the pressure of work which they faced.

However, it seems that the Justice Department was not happy to extend the Cape Province system to other offices. Private consultants from Pretoria recommended to the Justice Department that the network be dismantled and that each magistrate's office have a stand-alone system. They also instructed the programmer to terminate some of the available options on the existing system. The recommendations were apparently based on the need for financial autonomy of different offices and have already been implemented.

The new non-networked system has several less positive results. Firstly, it means that payments and payouts must happen at a single specified magistrate's court in each case. Secondly, it means that computer problems will take longer to be attended to than previously. Thirdly, it means that each office will need to do its own backup, which increases the risk of inadequate backup being done. It could also mean that offices are open to the public for shorter hours to allow each office to perform daily backup without working overtime on a regular basis. Finally, it means extra cost in that each office has had to get new machines. The new system will not be confined to maintenance cases. However there is a strong likelihood that it will cover only the financial aspects of cases.

It should surely be possible to reconcile the justifiable need for financial autonomy with the justifiable need for different parts of the whole system to interface. This should not be a case of an either/ or option: it should be easy to do both.

2.4 Training

A small proportion of parental maintenance matters reach the courts. The majority are handled by maintenance clerks and maintenance officers. The law allows for private representation of both or either parties in maintenance issues, both in the pre-court negotiations and in the court itself. In practice, however, those who apply for maintenance usually cannot afford a lawyer.

In 1995 a practitioner estimated that the fees for a maintenance case, including the first consultation, initial enquiry, phone calls, attendance at trial and prosecution, would cost about R2 000. In the majority of cases this is equivalent to many months of maintenance. For all practical purposes, therefore, the majority of non-custodial parents are dependent on the expertise and commitment of maintenance clerks and officers.

In theory maintenance officers are prosecutors while maintenance clerks are administrators. The Department of Justice maintains that the two functionaries should not be confused and that the maintenance officers are 'usually' public prosecutors. In reality, however, maintenance clerks often perform the duties of maintenance officers. The training of these two groups is thus of central importance if applicants and respondents are to receive, and to perceive that they receive, justice. This part of the process is of further importance given the Constitution's entrenchment of the individual's right to administrative justice i.e. that '(e)veryone has the right to administrative action that is lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair'. [Clause 33(1)].

The Department of Justice stated that the duties of a maintenance clerk "are such that in service training provided by the supervising officer concerned would usually suffice" (response to questions in Parliament). However, reports suggest that it is usually the previous incumbent - who is herself or himself a very junior person - who provides the training. Reports also suggest that the maintenance clerks, besides being severely overworked, are often unaware of many of the details of the Act. This problem is not confined to clerks.

Public prosecutors receive formal training at Justice College. The statistics of employment and training suggest that a maximum of one third of all prosecutors are reached by courses of this College each year. The extremely high turnover among prosecutors exacerbates the problem.

Some problems with the training with reference to maintenance are:

• Only a small part of the curriculum is devoted to maintenance.
• Course notes are out of date: the current version of Code Maintenance, which is the Justice College manual used in training magistrates and prosecutors on the matter, does not yet contain the 1991 legislative amendments to the Act, for example.
• Teaching staff have no practical experience of maintenance courts.
• Neither clerks nor officers have training in accounting, which affects their ability to understand the income and assets issues on which they must decide.
• Clerks and officers receive no gender sensitivity training.

The inadequacies of this training are especially serious in the case of maintenance, given that (a) few of the applicants have private legal representation, yet the outcome has such far-reaching effects for their lives and those of their families and (b) maintenance law is so different from other legislation in being a composite of civil and criminal procedure, and involving complicated emotional and socio-economic issues.

2.5 Administrative and legislative discretion by clerks and officers

The determination of the actual amount of maintenance to be paid can occur in different places. It can happen in negotiations between the man and woman, in discussion with the maintenance officer, or in the court room. At all these stages court personnel are formally charged with applying the common law formula of burden proportionate to income of the parents. In practice, however, there is enormous discretion.

An applicant for parental maintenance is required to provide details of expenditure on the children. Some courts have devised their own schedules to assist parents in compiling this information. However there is no standard questionnaire. Maintenance officers and magistrates are not required to collect and aggregate information on the level of awards, nor other relevant data upon which these amounts depend, such as the income of the parents, the number and ages of children, and so on. Further, there is no reference to more generalised research as to the costs of raising children. Again, it is left to the discretion of the officers as to what is reasonable.

Burman (1988) notes the generally low and inadequate level of awards in parental maintenance. Apart from her work, there has been almost no research in South Africa on the level of awards. For this Committee's work, an analysis was done of the records of 648 clients assisted by Maintenance Assistance Services, a Cape Town based agency. In 85% of the cases, parental maintenance was being sought for two or fewer children, and clients experienced difficulty in getting maintenance from the birth of the child through to the teenage years.

There was a great variation between courts as to the monthly amount which was awarded, from an average R203.33 in Mitchells Plain and R219.83 in Athlone, to R598.46 in Wynberg. This variation was not explained by the number of children. For example the Mitchells Plain records reflect the largest numbers of children per applicant but the lowest awards. Appendix 5 contains further details of this case study.

The low level of awards must be explained, at least in part, by the low levels of income of much of the South African population. However Burman's analysis uncovered a further area of concern when she looked at how these amounts were arrived at. Theoretically the amount of awards is determined by a common law formula. The gross incomes of both parents are added together. The proportional division between the parties is determined pro rata according to their relative income. These proportions are applied to a calculation of the child's reasonable needs, which would include a portion of housing and other joint costs. Once these amounts have been calculated, there is an inquiry into the ability of the non-custodial parent to pay.

However in practice there is a lot of leeway. Burman reports that:

... (i)nterviews showed that the criteria used by maintenance officers, commissioners, judges, and lawyers in fixing maintenance awards varied considerably, even where guidelines existed. (Burman, 1988:515)

The Gauteng Maintenance Action Group provides assistance to maintenance applicants, and their accounts support allegations from other organisations of corruption and bribery. Informants described how in a Johannesburg court, at the enquiry the woman and man are first interviewed separately by the maintenance officer before being called in together to negotiate with each other. The Maintenance Action Group, and others, are convinced that the separate interview with the man provides the opportunity for him to bribe the officer.

This allegation is further evidence of the significant differences in practices at different magistrate's courts, differences which include, but extend beyond, differential treatment of women of different race groups. The range of practices is somewhat surprising, and suggests that significant changes could be made through simple directives from senior management within the Department.

Various countries have experimented with ways of using formulae to determine the level of maintenance. Australia's formula is based on declared income, which reduces the scope for administrative discretion considerably. The introduction of the formula has increased the average amount being paid by non-custodial parents despite the major economic recession during the first few years of the scheme.

Legislation was passed concurrently which required that the courts have regard to research on the costs of children. Different methods may be used to calculate the actual costs of child-rearing. The Canadians, in attempting to reform their own system, did comparative research into different models for determining costs. This, as well as the work done in Australia on formulae, is summarised in Appendix 6.

South Africa has much to learn from the experiences of other countries, but their formulae are not optimal for the situation here of relatively low education of both clients and maintenance staff, and poor information sources. Nevertheless, South Africa has increasingly reliable income and expenditure data available, from sources such as the University of Port Elizabeth, the University of South Africa, the PSLSD, and the October Household Surveys. It should be possible to disseminate more widely the actual costs of child-rearing, in the hope that the public in general, and the judicial system in particular, would have regard for them.

3 Issues and debates

3.1 Costs and benefits to the custodial parents

There is a perception among some non-custodial parents and judicial officers that custodial parents 'abuse' the money they receive and spend it on themselves rather than their children. One Cape Town practitioner whose family law practice includes a lot of men explained:

Eighty percent of the time the men don't pay because they feel the mother squanders the money ... He is dragged to the Maintenance Court ... In a lot of cases mothers abuse the court process. (Unpublished research)

In practice, the custodial parent is usually in anything but an enviable position. International studies show that fathers tend to be better off after divorce, while women and their children are worse off, and there is no reason to believe that the situation would be any different in South Africa. The international patterns are related to the loss of the second earner and also to the generally lower earnings of women. These patterns also occur in South Africa. They result, in turn, in a substantial burden on the social security system.

The patterns also have implications for gender equality which, since 1994, has been entrenched in the interim South African constitution. Many of the arguments centre on the notion of the unpaid labour performed by women, the way this is unvalued or undervalued in the society, and the practical effect this has on substantive, rather than formal, equality of women and men.

Thus Weitzman writes about the general effects of divorce and new notions of equality on women in the United States of America. She argues that:

... (i)nstead of recognition for their contributions as homemakers and mothers, and instead of compensation for the years of lost opportunities and impaired earning capacities, these women now face a divorce law that treats them equally and expects them to be equally capable of supporting themselves after divorce ... In fact, marriage itself contributes to the economic inequalities between men and women, to the different structural opportunities that the two spouses face at divorce. (Weitzman, 1985: 84)

Weitzman's argument focuses on property and income division in all divorces, whether including children or not. However, her argument has implications for children as well as women. The implications go beyond the purely financial. She refers, for example, to "mounting evidence" which suggests that:

... children of divorce who experience the most psychological stress are those whose post-divorce lives have been impaired by inadequate income ... When family income is adequate, there are no differences in anxiety-depression levels between children in divorced families and those in intact families. (Weitzman, 1985:106)

Bringing the arguments closer to home, both geographically and in terms of parental support, a practitioner in South Africa explained:

The maintenance court is very mathematical about it. They adjust for the relative earnings, but don't take into account that the children are being looked after by the woman. That is seen as a benefit, which is how the women see it. But the value of the child care is never taken into account. (Unpublished research)

In South Africa, as in most jurisdictions, awards must take account of the ability of the non-custodial parent to pay. In many countries the law or regulations state explicitly that this parent should be accorded a certain reserve or level of "free" or exempt income to support him or herself before any awards in respect of children are considered.

This argument holds water where there is adequate social security. It is obviously impractical to expect someone who simply does not have the means to pay anything to someone else. In practice, however, where the social security system is inadequate or difficult to access, the custodial parent ends up literally "holding the baby". The custodial parent does not have the option of reserving free income for her or himself. S/he is forced to attend to the needs of the children with the first rand of income.

A Cape Town practitioner observed:

The whole system and the attitude of the magistrate is against women. If there is no money, that is the woman's problem. If the father can show his expenditure is more than his income, you can't invoke an order. (Unpublished research)

3.2 A culture of payment

Other countries have tried to re-create parental responsibility through building a culture of payment. The Australian Child Support Evaluation Advisory Group concluded that:

... a major effect of the Scheme is a change in the community ethos so that support by parents is seen as a necessary consequence of their separation rather than as an exception.

However, despite the clear picture painted by statistics, another official Australian report notes that the Scheme:

... was generally seen as a major and controversial social reform which could take up to a decade to become accepted and to achieve change in social attitudes to the financial responsibilities of parents.

A commentator in Britain made similar observations on the deep emotional and cultural attitudes which legislation of this type invoked in that country:

Introducing the (Child Support) Act meant a massive reversal of the tacit social acceptance that a father's responsibility was contingent, a mother's natural - that fathers paid up/stayed involved if and only if they wanted to. Good fathers did so, perhaps, and those who didn't were hardly approved of: but compare that to the difference in public perception of good and bad mothers to see how relatively little weight it holds. That more than two million children in single-parent families in Britain were getting only 10 per cent of their support from maintenance payments revealed a widespread refusal to care, financially and otherwise. (Innes, 1995: 130)

This writer concludes her discussion on what is known as the 'dad tax' in this way:

We needed to create a climate in which maintenance is not a readily evaded joke but an accepted obligation ... Men are beginning to have brought home to them the financial consequences of divorce in a way women have known for years. There has always been a 'mum tax'. (Innes, 1995: 132)

In South Africa the new government instituted the Masakhane Campaign which aimed to instil in the general populace a culture and acceptance of paying rates and taxes in the areas in which they lived. The campaign has had to contend with years of conditions during which a culture of resistance to an illegitimate government condoned - and even lauded - non-payment.

A similar campaign to build a culture in which parents accept their responsibility towards their children, and in which those who pay are regarded as responsible and laudable citizens rather than weak and silly fools, is urgently needed.

3.3 Penalties

The creation of a culture of payment is a 'carrot', an attempt to induce non-custodial parents to behave morally towards their children. Other countries have also used a range of 'sticks' to encourage payment.

A study in the United States of America found that child support payment rates:

... dramatically increased upon the occurrence of two factors: (1) automatic enforcement by public officials when non-payment first occurs, and (2) jailing those held in contempt for non-compliance with support orders. (Bruch and Wiker, quoted in Florida Supreme Court Gender Bias Study Commission, 1990)

The 'sticks', which differ from state to state, include:

• advertising the ten "most wanted" dads for non-payment of child support by means of mugshots, details on milk cartons, in newspapers, etc.;
• registration of child support debts with credit agencies so that those in default are not able to access credit;
• extensive use of property liens and seizure and sale of property;
• licensing penalties so that, for example, a non-payer is not able to register as a tradesperson or professional, or loses his driver's licence;
• interception of lottery winnings.

There are also federal guidelines as to how quickly the courts have to take action on being notified of delinquency in payments.

In France Van Zyl notes that since 1973 there has been a policy of:

... rigorous enforcement ... and a whole arsenal of remedies has been made available to the creditor ... Clearly in France the attitude is that an unrelenting pursuit of the maintenance debtor is the best way of dealing with difficulties of enforcement. (Van Zyl, 1987:152-4)

For example:

• The debtor's retirement and disability pensions, as well as earnings, can be attached.
• Public bodies are compelled to disclose to those concerned with enforcement all necessary information relating to the debtor.
• Social security agencies may allocate part of their family support payments for this purpose and then attempt to recover the relevant amount from debtor.
• A range of criminal charges can be brought against the defaulter e.g. abandonment of home and/or family (penalty of three months or a year's imprisonment and/or a fine), or failure to report a change of address (six months and a fine). On conviction of abandonment of family, the defaulter's driving licence can be suspended.
• If other means have been attempted without success, the applicant can apply to the Treasury whose agents then attempt to collect the amount owing plus 10% surcharge which the State retains.

In Sweden and Germany, if the non-custodial parent does not pay child support, s/he is traced through the welfare system and the welfare allowance docked. This method of enforcement is clearly only available where there is an extensive system of social support.

3.4 Second families

A particularly thorny issue in the South African context is the question of second families and multiple parenting, and the extent to which new obligations lessen the non-custodial parent's obligations to the first family. Not only does South Africa have an increasing divorce rate, but this is overlaid on severely disrupted family structures.

The legal position seems unclear. Burman reported in the late 1980s that:

although the existence of a new family is not meant to affect the amount ordered, magistrates and commissioners interviewed (but not the judges) said that it had to be taken into account in practice, and a social worker reported that in her many years of work in the Cape Peninsula, she had frequently had cases where the magistrate reduced a maintenance order because the husband had remarried. (Burman, 1988:515)

On the other hand Marshall (1994) quotes a Johannesburg magistrate who comes out clearly in favour of the rights of the children of the first relationship: "In the eyes of the law it is their first marriage and children who are their first obligation. They may not feather a second nest at the expense of the first."

Van Zyl points out (1987:15) that from a legal point of view non-custodial parents cannot use their obligation to a new family to avoid paying. However, from the point of view of equity, she argues that one must look at the outcome. Thus one judge has said that a father who has remarried must adjust his own standard of living rather than allow his children to be prejudiced. Another judge has said there is no general rule and that the children of the second marriage must also be considered. Van Zyl argues that if it is not permissible to discriminate against children on the basis of illegitimacy, discrimination on the basis of priority is also "untenable".

It seems that judges, magistrates and the law in general are divided on this issue. What should be indisputable, however, is that the children of the second relationship should not enjoy a higher standard of living than those of the first.

3.5 Customary law

As in most areas of personal and family law, maintenance raises the question of the interplay of, and possible conflict between, customary and statute law. Further, as in other areas, there is no agreement on many of the questions. The problem is exacerbated by the different variants and interpretations of customs, customary law and the adaptations which have occurred over the years. The South African Law Commission is embarking on a wide-ranging investigation of customary law. The discussion here will be brief, and will merely raise some of the most important issues which appear to apply in many areas.

In discussions of maintenance two separate aspects of customary law are usually raised. In the case of married couples with children, there is the issue of lobola. With unmarried couples, there is isondlo (or its equivalent).

Lobola is loosely translated as 'bridewealth'. It establishes a relationship between the two families - that of the bride and bridegroom. It is a sign of appreciation from the bridegroom's to the bride's family as the woman will be joining the new family and will produce children who will use the husband's surname. In essence the woman is seen as being given to the husband's family.

Isondlo can be likened to 'damages'. The payment is made to the woman's parents. The payment acknowledges that the pregnancy is a 'mistake', and that it is not socially acceptable to have a child out of wedlock. It is seen as compensating for the lowering of the family's name. It also acknowledges the woman's future lower value in terms of lobola because of the loss of virginity. In the case of a younger woman, it is a recognition that her schooling may be disturbed.

Some people argue that isondlo is equivalent to maintenance. They argue that the cattle was intended to provide the milk that would feed the child that was born. However, the counter-arguments are strong. Despite payment of isondlo, the two families will usually still sit down together to negotiate how they will help each other in maintaining the child. In exceptional cases the child will be taken care of by the man's family. In some cases the young man and/or his parents take responsibility for paying the young woman's school fees so that she can return to class.

As discussed above, there are no reliable statistics on maintenance claims in South Africa. There are also no reliable statistics on customary marriages. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that customary law is strongest in the more rural areas, and increasingly weak in urban areas. Maintenance statistics, were they available, would almost certainly indicate that there were proportionately more claims in urban areas, both because of the weakened adherence to customary laws and the greater disruption of the extended family and other support structures.

An Harare based organisation, Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), has done research in six other Southern African countries which suggests that most women still begin their attempts to solve maintenance problems by reporting the case to a man's family (Armstrong, 1992:58). However, when women gave reasons as to why they did not use the court system, they generally did not mention customary law. Rather their reasons could be divided into five basic categories: practical problems, concern for the children, pride and a desire for independence (among middle-class women who were earning money), fear of physical harm, and desire for marriage.

The research also revealed that customary law was weakening in all countries, and weakest in those which were more industrialised. In Zimbabwe, for instance, none of the women interviewed mentioned customary law when asked about their knowledge of law. (Armstrong, 1992:131). Further, the preponderance of maintenance cases in the daily work of the courts revealed that parental maintenance was a widely accepted principle in the countries concerned. In Zimbabwe's community courts over 50% of all cases related to maintenance. This accounted for between 3 000 and 5 000 cases each year in the community and magistrate's courts in Harare alone. In Botswana maintenance accounted for between 32% and 39% of the business of magistrate's courts (Armstrong, 1992:119).

There are certainly many South African women and men who still regard customary law as more important to them than statutory law. Where, however, the woman elects to use the civil law, the equality provisions of the Constitution and the rights of children suggest that the arguments supporting the man's resort to customary law are weak.

WLSA states fairly unequivocally that the decline of customary law is of benefit to women:

To a large extent, the elimination of customary law in maintenance cases benefits women. In the customary system, women have little power and their rights are undercut by the rights of the family, particularly the man's family. As Sachs and Welsh noted about Mozambique: '... family law at the local level is the law of women's rights, since men have such power through custom and through their economic and physical strength as not to need the law on their side, while women can only succeed if the organised power of the community comes to their aid.' (Armstrong, 1992:87)

There is some evidence that some customary law authorities themselves accept that they do not have jurisdiction in the area of maintenance. In a South African workshop session on maintenance which included both rural- and urban-based magistrates, participants claimed that traditional authorities usually declined to deal with maintenance matters and rather referred them to the courts. There are likely to be strong regional variations in practice.

4 The way forward

In all discussions of parental maintenance, the issue of unemployment and the informal sector are sure to arise. Where must the money come from, people ask, if the non-custodial parents are themselves not earning, or earning very little? Further, given the shape of the South African economy, of what use are examples from the more industrialised countries with their much more developed economies and social security systems?

These arguments are obviously valid. They do not, however, absolve either the government or those non-custodial parents who can pay from doing what they can to ameliorate the position of children and those parents who are caring for them. In the first few pages of their summary document, WLSA notes that governments in the Southern African region do not have the necessary resources to support all needy children within their borders. However, what they can and must do, is ensure that resources which are available reach the children who need them. (Armstrong, 1987:7) The effective implementation of parental maintenance provisions is one important way of doing this.

During July the Committee, in collaboration with the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, hosted a one day workshop on proposals for reform. There were approximately 35 participants at the workshop, coming mainly from the Western Cape and Gauteng (see Appendix 7 for a list of workshop participants). Participants included maintenance officials ranging from clerks to magistrates, a member of the South African Law Commission, lawyers, academics, workers from non-governmental organisations, a local government councillor, human rights activists as well as several members of the Maintenance Action Group.

The workshop discussion centred around a draft list of suggested reforms based on proposals of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (NADEL), the Maintenance Action Group, the Black Sash Advice Office, the Namibian Legal Assistance Centre and several past and present magistrates. The workshop succeeded in reaching general agreement on a long list of administrative and public education reforms.

The amended and consolidated document (see Appendix 8) has been forwarded to the Minister of Justice and to the Policy Planning Unit in the Department of Justice. Just prior to the workshop the South African Law Commission had received an official request from the Minister of Justice that they examine the Maintenance Act. The proposals will therefore also go forward to that body.

A second suggestion is a maintenance campaign, similar to the government's Masakhane campaign, which focuses on parental responsibility rather than payment of rates and taxes. At present it seems that many non-custodial parents feel no obligation to pay. They know that most of their friends and colleagues in a similar position are not paying. Parents must be made to feel that it is their duty to support, and that they should be proud to be doing so. Awareness-raising could extend to the custodial parents, many of whom - particularly those not married to the other parent - are probably unaware of their rights to claim. It could also address civil servants such as Police and Justice officials who currently do not place high priority on maintenance matters and/or are reportedly often open to bribery by non-custodial parents.

Thirdly, the Justice Department should promote information sharing between magistrate's offices. Several centres have introduced innovations. Some offices have introduced dedicated tracing agents for maintenance. Camerer reported that the tracing agent employed in Johannesburg had enjoyed a 75% success rate and more than covered the expense of employing him (Camerer, 1994). Athlone in the Western Cape several years ago instituted a complaints phone line. Several centres have ideas for further innovations. Some, for example, have suggested introducing child care services or vendors selling refreshments. Both of these innovations would ease the burden for those who wait long hours for service as well as providing income-generating opportunities for local communities.

Fourthly, there is a need for more research and thought to be given to maintenance in rural areas. Most of the bigger centres have staff and courts dedicated to maintenance matters, and any innovations would enjoy economies of scale and thus be more cost-effective. In smaller and rural centres staff deal with maintenance as well as other matters. It is also in these areas that the children and parents are usually poorer, and unemployment higher. The WLSA research reported that the researchers in Lesotho "constantly" heard of the importance of maintenance for women whose partners were working on the South African mines. (Armstrong, 1992: 112).

The position for many rural South African women could well be similar. Yet to date most of the available research and knowledge, apart from the Black Sash research into two Eastern Cape towns (Teixeira and Chambers, 1995), reflects the urban or metropolitan situation. Research is urgently needed into the situation and particular problems which arise in rural areas.

CHAPTER SIX     [Top]

THE PROVISION AND FINANCING OF WELFARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TOCHILD AND FAMILY POLICY AND PROVISION

1 Introduction

Child and family support services are one part of the overall financing and provision of welfare and social security. The objective of this Chapter is to provide a holistic though summarised picture of welfare, so that child and family support can be understood in context. The Chapter thus starts with a description of the past fragmentation of welfare provision. It goes on to describe the state welfare budget with its two main components: social security, and social welfare services. It then considers non-governmental sources of funding for welfare, and the problems the welfare sector faces in terms of measurement of outcomes.

The focus then narrows down to family policy in South Africa, and welfare measures that have been taken to protect and preserve family life. This is followed by a description of the different benefits to children and families, and the Chapter concludes with an estimation of the escalating costs of the different tiers of provision of child care which have to come into operation if ways are not found to keep the child in a family setting.

2 The development of fragmented welfare services

Welfare provision in South Africa has historically been a partnership between the government and the private welfare sector. Government provided some services itself, but regulated and subsidised formal welfare organisations. The subsidies enabled welfare organisations to perform a range of activities including many statutory tasks. The work of these welfare organisations was in turn complemented by other non-governmental organisations, community based organisations, religious groups, and other indigenous forms of support.

Over the years the apartheid government developed the complete separation of its own services, and pressured private organisations to do the same. While white welfare organisations were never adequately subsidised according to the norms of industrialised countries on which the model was based, they nevertheless had wealthy communities, churches, and the private sector to draw on for further financial and material support. Some welfare organisations developed in African urban residential areas; the Indian community had a long tradition of community-based welfare and educational activities; and in urban areas the churches played an important role in the development of services for Coloured people. In African rural areas, and especially in the 'independent states' and the homelands, there was virtually no formal private welfare sector, although there were many self help groups and associations, and a great deal of work done by religious organisations.

The fragmentation of welfare into racially and geographically separate administrations made an holistic understanding of the system of provision and financing difficult. A 1991 survey of government-provided welfare showed the similarities and differences between welfare administrations (Lund, 1992); Patel (1992) surveyed the welfare services initiated by extra-parliamentary, grassroots and labour organisations in an attempt to establish an indigenous conceptualisation of social development; and van der Berg (1994a and 1994b) undertook a comprehensive review of the social security aspects of welfare. No major survey has been done of the formal private welfare sector, or of its linkages with state-provided and/ or occupationally provided welfare.

In addition to this lack of systematic study, there were no adequate information systems in the welfare field even within the state. Planning was ideologically driven. The 'own affairs' departments maintained a semblance of orderly data; the provincial administrations delivering welfare to black people in the former Republic of South Africa did less so; the more peripheral homelands and TBVC states were extremely uneven in their programming and accounting.

The Committee's work has been seriously affected by the lack of reliable information, as also the lack of capacity in the national and many of the provincial departments to make sense of disorderly data. The situation is made worse by the ongoing amalgamation of the welfare departments. In particular there is not a high level of confidence in some of the global figures on child and family grants provided by the departments.

3 The state welfare budget

The welfare budget comprises two parts: social security ('pensions and grants') and social welfare services. Social welfare services are provided by social and other workers in government service, or through subsidies to private welfare organisations. The social welfare services part of the budget also covers public and private institutional care for children, elderly people, people with disabilities, and other groups with special needs.

The 1995/1996 welfare budget was R13.4 billion. The main Votes in this budget are:

Vote 1: Administration

Vote 2: Social Security

Vote 3: Social assistance - this refers to the subsidies given to welfare organisations, and is not used in the way in which most welfare workers refer to social assistance, which is as part of social security

Vote 4: Welfare Facilities - this refers to social work services and institutional care provided directly by government.

There are a few smaller votes which are not of concern here. The official names and numbers of votes which are used in the budget are also used in Table 4.

The table shows the allocation according to three main votes in the 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure. It shows the dominance of social security, with 85.2% being spent on this compared to 8% for subsidies to welfare organisations, and 3.1% for social services and institutional care provided directly by government. It shows too how four of the poorest provinces - KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Province, Mpumalanga and North West - allocate more than 90% of their welfare budget to social security.

Table 4: The main votes in the welfare budget: Social Security (2), Social Assistance (3) and Social Welfare Facilities (4), by province, 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure

Source: Elisabeth Ardington

Each of the votes shown in Table 4 can themselves be roughly categorised into fields of service such as care of elderly people, and child and family care. The right half of the table shows that only 2.1% of the subsidies (Vote 3: Social Assistance) go to the field of child and family care, while 29.3% of the money allocated for direct service provision by the state (Vote 4: Welfare Facilities) is allocated to child and family care.

Of the overall welfare budget, the National Department receives a little over R70 million - about one half of one percent of overall welfare spending. Welfare functions were delegated to provinces as a Schedule 6 function in the interim Constitution, and will be under Schedule 4 in the new Constitution. This means it is a concurrent national and provincial function: provinces have some discretion as to provision so long as they operate in the framework of national norms and standards (which are far from fully developed as yet).

3.1 Social security spending

In 1995/1996, R11.7 billion, or some four fifths of the total welfare budget, was allocated to social security. Because the delivery of social security is largely an administrative function, a small part of the welfare budget is spent on personnel.

The social security vote has four categories:

• pensions for elderly people - the Old Age Pension and War Veterans Pension
• pensions for people with disabilities - the Disability Grant
• grants in the field of child and family care (about which more details will be given below) - the State Maintenance Grant , the Foster Care Grant and the Care Dependency Grant
• grants for relief of distress or social relief.

In May 1995 the Department of Welfare estimated there were just over 2.8

million beneficiaries of state pensions and grants of all types. According to the Draft White Paper on Welfare, about 7 out of every 100 South Africans were in receipt of a grant of some sort in 1994. Beneficiaries were unevenly distributed as to race (especially the State Maintenance Grant) and as to province.

Table 5: Provincial Estimates of Expenditure on categories of social security, 1995/96

Source: Elisabeth Ardington

Table 5 shows that pensions for elderly people comprise the largest part - 63.2% - of social security expenditure, followed by the Disability Grant which consumes about a quarter (23.6%) of it. Both the Old Age Pension and the Disability Grant are statutory, non-contributory, payable from general revenue and (in law) means-tested. In practice the means test has been unevenly applied.

Racial parity has been reached for elderly people and for people with disabilities. The take-up rate for elderly people is relatively high (more than 80% of those in the eligible age group actually receive it); the growth of the Old Age Pension will in future be determined by the rate of growth of the elderly population and the value of the grant. Present projections are that between 1991 and 2010, the percentage of South Africans who will be older than 65 will increase from 3.8% to 4.8%.

It is harder to estimate a take-up rate for the Disability Grant, because it is difficult to make accurate assessments of the numbers of people with disabilities, and also because of the amount of discretion that there is in the assessment of disablement. While many people with disabilities do not receive the Disability Grant, there has been an increase in numbers receiving it in the last five years. It is likely that there is more knowledge about the grant, more access to it; it is also probable, as is the case in industrialised countries, that there is a relationship between rates of unemployment and the demand for disability benefits.

As has been noted, the amount consumed by grants in the field of child and family care is small, at 12.1% of the social security allocation. Table 5 reflects how the Northern and Western Cape, which constituted part of the former Cape Province, spend proportionately more than other provinces on the child and family grants than on those for elderly and disabled people.

The social relief has been unevenly applied, and in some parts of the country scarcely exists as a benefit. It is a temporary relief measure which is designed for people who are awaiting grants, or who are faced by other disasters. It is sometimes given as cash, and sometimes in the form of food vouchers. In the past, certain administrations paid rent and electricity bills for clients in temporary distress.

3.2 Spending on the social services

The social services receive the small amount of the welfare budget that is not taken by social security. They are provided either directly by government departments, or by subsidy to private welfare organisations, which must be registered to receive such subsidy. In the past (and to some extent still today) subsidies were based on the number of social work posts. There has been a statement of intent to subsidise social service programmes, and to be more flexible about what kinds of organisations can register for subsidy.

Just as the social security budget is dominated by the pensions to elderly people, provision for the elderly has received a disproportionate amount of the social services allocation. Further, services were skewed heavily towards expensive institutional provision for elderly white people. A further bias was the disproportionate subsidy of organisations run within the Dutch Reformed churches for the service of white people only.

4 Statutory work done by private organisations for the state

The public is not generally aware that much of the work done by social workers in private welfare organisations is statutory, that is, carried out in fulfilment of the requirements of legislation and therefore a direct responsibility of the government. Much of this work has to do with protecting the basic rights of children. South Africa has legislation specifically designed for the protection of children, and an action such as the removal of a child from her or his parents has, by law, to be supervised by a person with professional qualifications, such as a social worker.

An unwritten condition of the receipt of subsidy by many welfare organisations is that they will do this statutory work for the government department. Common examples of statutory work are that social workers process adoptions under the Child Care Act (Act 74 of 1983); undertake procedures for the alternative placement of children, for example into foster care or into children's homes, remove children from their parents' care, making a child a ward of the court, also under the Child Care Act; and prepare supervision reports for people doing community service either on parole or as an alternative to a prison sentence under the Probation Services Act (Act 116 of 1991).

There is a contradiction involved at present. On the one hand, the government subsidises welfare organisations with the express aim that they initiate innovative and flexible models of provision. More recently, the organisations have been specifically encouraged to break new ground in developmental social welfare. On the other hand, though, the majority of the time of most social workers in child welfare agencies is spent doing routine statutory work - work which is absolutely cardinal to the protection of children.

The welfare organisations themselves do not, on the whole, prepare financial accounts for the state which reflect the real costs of providing this service, so they cannot compare it to the value of the subsidy to argue for more subsidy or less statutory work. One effect of the voluntary sector doing this statutory work is that it constrains the ability of social workers to engage in new forms of developmental social welfare.

5 Non-governmental sources of funding for social services

All private welfare organisations spend resources on raising funds to supplement the government subsidy. Many are active also in recruiting, training, and supervising volunteers to assist them in their role. A subsidy to one staff member who concentrates on fund-raising thus catalyses much more than just her post is worth. Webb and Wistow (1983) described the relationship between public and private welfare well as follows:

Public expenditure is the bedrock on which much voluntary and private care is funded. These formal services are in turn an important means of underpinning much informal care. They enable hard-pressed relatives to obtain advice, temporary relief, and support. Public expenditure 'ripples' through the 'mixed economy' and directly or indirectly calls forth a much larger measure of care than is provided by the state services themselves.

Welfare organisations seek out various means of supplementary funding: from small local jumble sales, to programmatic commitments from Community Chests and Christmas stamps, to appeals to the corporate social responsibility commitments of the private sector. Some succeed in getting funds from the latter. But, on the whole, business has been less interested in providing crèches for children, or shelters for battered women, than it has been in supporting secondary and tertiary education in science and accountancy for young people.

Some welfare organisations have attempted to lever funds from international donor agencies. In general, only those who have managed to place a firm developmental stamp on their programmes have succeeded. The overall decline in international support for South African non-governmental organisations will mean that this avenue will have limited potential for sustainable funding of welfare organisations.

6 Performance criteria in welfare

South African welfare in the past was characterised by a lack of accountability, and a lack of good management. This was true in both government and private welfare. For some years there has been a new emphasis on efficiency, effectiveness, and on setting performance criteria for the measurement of outcomes. This is to be welcomed.

All social sectors find it difficult to measure performance and outcomes. The central difficulty is developing indicators for the quality of services in addition to those that assess quantity. Thus in education, the fact that a certain number of classrooms were built, and a certain number of children attended school, is not a sufficient measure quality of teaching and learning, nor a good predictor of pass rates. In health, a home visit by a nurse could count as one unit of performance, but could vary in fact from a routine one minute-drop in, to an intensive visit with both preventive and curative aspects to it.

Accepting that there are difficulties in measurement for all sectors, it is still the case that welfare is disadvantaged relative to others social sectors with respect to devising standardised criteria for measurable outcomes for the preventive - and developmental - aspects of the work.

Health can estimate fairly precisely what the future savings on curative care for blind children will be as a result of a present immunisation campaign. Take for example the field of child abuse. It is known that reported cases of abuse represent only the tip of the iceberg of actual cases. If a child welfare agency embarks on a life skills programme, and an educational programme in schools where teachers are taught about early detection, one outcome may be a significant increase in reported child abuse. Is this because the programme is 'succeeding' and more children coming forward? Or is it simply a sign of more general public awareness of child abuse, independent of the intervention of the agency?

Health can 'count' the effects of its immunisation coverage - a demonstrably good preventive measure - in a way that welfare can only 'count' its curative services. There is a danger that the justified push towards 'efficiency' will result in a further weakening of welfare's already weak claims against the state, and from non-state sources of funding, for support.

7 Private sector coverage of welfare

South African commerce and industry provide occupational coverage through a number of welfare benefits for retirement provision, for disablement through the workplace, and for unemployment, under which fall maternity benefits. A brief review of provision is given here.

The consensus about retirement provision captured in the recent Smith Committee (1995) was that South Africa has good coverage for those in formal employment, that the insurance industry plays an important role in the economy, and that the state Old Age Pension should be seen as a fundamental pillar of retirement provision, not as a safety net, for the foreseeable future, while every effort should be made to encourage private savings for those who can afford it.

Disability and disease caused through work is covered by compensation legislation. Many categories of workers have fallen outside the legislation in the past, and the benefits were difficult to access, especially where workers were illiterate, and were in workplaces with little provision for occupational health and safety. New legislation is much improved. The Department of Welfare, however, continues to support the thousands of workers who rely on the state for Disability Grants because they were unable to claim their rightful entitlement to workers compensation.

Child and family care has less likelihood of being covered by social insurance, with the exception of maternity benefits for those already in formal employment. Maternity benefits fall under the Unemployment Insurance Act, No 30 of 1966. Section 37(1) of the Act provides that:

a female contributor who is unemployed may be paid benefits in accordance with the provisions of this Act in respect of her pregnancy and confinement for a period not exceeding twenty-six weeks ... whether or not she is capable of and available for work.

Benefits are paid at the same rate as ordinary unemployment benefits - i.e. 45% of the normal wage prior to receiving the benefit. The legislation contains a built-in disincentive to employers to pay more than 45% of the wage to the worker while on maternity leave, as above this level the Fund decreases its payment by one rand for every rand paid by the employer. An analysis by Budlender (1996a) of the relevant statistics suggests that employers do this. It would be an easy thing to amend this legislation, with no cost implications for the state.

Table 6 is based on information in the 1993 Annual Report of the Unemployment Insurance Fund. It shows both the number of applications and the benefits paid out by the fund. In each case it gives the nominal amount for maternity benefits, the total amount, and then maternity as a proportion of the total.

Table 6: Maternity applications and benefits as a percentage of the total Unemployment Insurance Fund, 1993

Source: Budlender, D., calculated from Unemployment Insurance Fund (1993)

With both the number of applications and the amount of benefits, the proportion attributable to maternity benefits more or less halved in the five year period concerned. In both cases by 1993 maternity benefits accounted for less than 9% of the total Fund. The decreased proportion is largely a result of the rapid increase in ordinary unemployment benefits.

8 The racial development of family policy

South Africa is a country with diverse religions, cultures and customs. Formal family policy however has been constructed by the politically dominant white group, first in colonial times and then under the apartheid government, and was based on the model of a nuclear family grounded in Christian values and practice. Apartheid as a national project did two things simultaneously. It positioned the Christian family as the centrepiece of the white nation. At the same time economic growth was premised on the fracturing of the family lives of those who were not white. As Monica Wilson eloquently states:

South Africa has lived on the capital of a very strong African family system, and that capital has been squandered. (Wilson, 1975: 18)

Two historical social enquiries show the dual programmes of former governments. The first captures early concerns about the effects of the urbanisation and influx control and wage policies on African family life; the second illustrates how the government attempted to protect white family life.

In 1938 a conference was called by the Johannesburg's Non-European and Native Affairs Department (City of Johannesburg, 1939). It was a time of rapid urbanisation and formation of an African working class. The conference was called to 'consider the alarming increase in juvenile delinquency among the Bantu population'. It cited the low wage levels which were 'hopelessly inadequate to keep a family under civilised conditions'. It described how infants were left in the care of older children and locked up at home while mother was away working, as well as the increase in unstable marital unions, and the act that there were no recreational facilities for young people.

Its policy recommendations were for free education for children. It called for employers to pay a reasonable wage. It recommended the extension of the State Maintenance Grant to Africans in urban areas. It charged that the alternative would be more poverty and ever rising juvenile delinquency, and unimaginable levels of crime and violence in years to come.

This conference can be compared with the 1961 Committee of Enquiry into Family Allowances. Its interpretation of its terms of reference were that it was:

... primarily concerned with means of promoting the numerical strength of the Whites through larger families, as well as ways of improving the standard of care and education of children in less-privileged (white) families. (Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Family Allowances, 1961: 2)

This is an interesting earlier example of government seeking to try to influence behaviour through social security mechanisms. Interestingly, even at that time, the Committee's international search for evidence led it to conclude that family allowances would not influence fertility rates - other variables, such as women's education, and urbanisation, were more influential.

From the 1930s through to the 1950s, a range of conferences and Committees called for ways of reducing poverty (the Carnegie Commission, 1928-1932); ways to combat poverty for the whole population (the Cape Town Social Survey, 1942); the creation of a national health system (the Gluckman Commission, from 1942 to 1944); and various social security commissions and committees coinciding with the end of the Second World War. Some strong liberal voices argued for racially inclusive services; they were countered by the growing voices of exclusively white interests. In 1948, the Nationalist Party came to power.

9 Forms of social security and welfare provision in child and family care

The government view on family child and support measures was that they were an essential mechanism for enabling impoverished parents to support their own children. The policies and laws reflecting this approach, especially the Child Care Act of 1960, were in theory applicable to all families, but this was not the case in practice. In the case of those who did benefit - mainly white, coloured and Indian families - the design was to direct state aid into family-based care, and when possibilities of this kind had been exhausted, to bring other forms of provision into play. Children who fell through one tier of provision were dealt with at progressively more legally complex and expensive levels.

This thinking was not as clearly enshrined in the Child Care Act of 1983, and in the meanwhile the government had weakened its own purpose of family preservation by failing to make sufficient provision for the social service infrastructure which was needed to make family and community support measures work to the full. Thus many children fell unnecessarily through the first layers of the system to the more expensive and less emotionally healthy institutional provisions. However, there were many others for whom the family support measures succeeded in their purpose.

Cash transfers from the welfare system did not operate in isolation and there is much evidence of inter-sectoral planning. Grants and pensions were supplemented with aid in a range of other forms. Much if not most of the support which enabled poor white families to make their way out of poverty came less from welfare than from housing, health, and education. There were also the major public works employment programmes of the 1930s which provided temporary and then permanent employment for thousands of white men, a smaller number of white women, and very few coloured and African people. As Pieter le Roux puts it, despite expressed concerns about the creation of socialism, in fact the government created a whites only social democracy.

Over the years a number of grants were established which took a relatively small part of the overall welfare budget. Table 7a and Table 7b show the amounts allocated to grants in the field of child and family care in 1995/96, as well as the proportion consumed by each type of grant.

Table 7 (a): Child and family care grants in the social security budget, 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure, Rand '000

Table 7 (b): Child and family care grants in the social security budget,1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure, percentages

Source: constructed by Elisabeth Ardington using 1995/96 Estimates of Expenditure

Information about the Foster Care Grant was uneven, and the information about the Care Dependency Grants is highly unreliable as the grant was in the process of being transferred from Health and/or Justice to Welfare. The general point to be made is that the greatest proportion - 84.4% - is consumed by the State Maintenance Grant.

9.1 The Family Allowance and the State Maintenance Grant

The principle of enabling destitute parents to care for their children by means of financial transfers was at the heart of the provision in the Child Care Act of 1960 for Family Allowances for intact families, and for State Maintenance Grants for single parent families. The Act also provided for the removal of children deemed to be 'in need of care' from the custody of their parents; the thinking was, however, that this should never occur purely for reasons of poverty - the parents should rather, where necessary, receive state financial assistance.

Family Allowances were awarded to white and to coloured families, and have been phased out so will not receive further attention here. The State Maintenance Grant was imported into the country, from England, in the 1920s. The assumptions about family life on which the State Maintenance Grant was based were similar to those used by Lord William Beveridge in his model for the British welfare state. The 'normal' family form was a two-generation unit, with a father as the main breadwinner, in a country with full employment, with a mother at home looking after a number of children; if working, she would be working at a low wage. The State Maintenance Grant was a form of support designed to protect a mother and her children in the unusual and uncommon event that the marriage ended in divorce, or if the father died or deserted.

The State Maintenance Grant is means tested. It has been payable to a South African female single parent if she was divorced, widowed, deserted by the husband or by the father of her child(ren); or never married; or if her husband or the father of her child(ren) was in a specified institution such as a jail or psychiatric hospital for six months or more. If a mother (and now a father) applies for a State Maintenance Grant on the grounds of desertion and non-support, s/he has to show proof that s/he has been deserted for six months, and that an attempt has been made to obtain financial support through the judicial system, in the form of a private maintenance award.

There are two parts to the State Maintenance Grant: the Parent Allowance and the Child Allowance. Under the old regulations, grants were payable for up to four legitimate children and one illegitimate child. In practice, there was much variation in how the grants were applied in different administrations, with all but a few African people being effectively excluded. Some administrations dealing with African people did not administer the grant at all. Of those who did, most awarded only the Child Allowance, and some for one child only. In some administrations the Child Allowance was only given if a death certificate for the father could be produced. Divorce and desertion did not qualify a person for the State Maintenance Grant in, for example, former Bophuthatswana.

Social grants for child support were always very low, and the white families who remained dependent on them tended to be those with serious social problems or physical or intellectual limitations. Without these forms of provision a great many more white children would undoubtedly have become dependent on substitute care.

The Social Assistance Act of 1992 introduced a number of changes to the State Maintenance Grant, chief of which are the following:

• The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate status of children is no longer made, nor between different forms of marital union.
• The Child Allowance can be awarded for a maximum of two children only.

• Fathers who can prove they are the sole supporter of children, and that they have insufficient means to provide support, are now also eligible.
  • The Means Test has been made more generous, in that it has reduced the problem of the 'poverty trap', whereby having even small private savings led to a severe financial penalty in the amount of the award.
  • In the old regulations, if a husband became disabled and qualified for a Disability Grant, his wife would automatically get the State Maintenance Grant. Under the new regulations, the partner now has to apply and be means tested.
  • The State Maintenance Grant used to be payable to children until they reached 18, and this could be extended if the child continued into tertiary educational institutions such as universities or technikons. Now it can be paid up until 21 only if the child is still in secondary education, or to the end of the calendar year in which the child turns 18.

9.2 The 'Granny grant'

Because of the common role played by grandmothers in the support of young children, many administrations introduced what came to be called the 'granny grant'. In effect this meant that a grandmother could be awarded the Child Allowance part of the State Maintenance Grant for the support of grandchildren. Some aunts and other traditional guardians got this grant too. These granny grants have been phased out over the last year; grandmothers are being encouraged rather to apply for the (higher) Foster Care Grant.

9.3 The Foster Care Grant

Where children can not be adequately cared for in the family setting, the next level of direct state financial provision for child support is the Foster Care Grant. The intention behind foster parenting is to provide some support to non-relatives who are willing to provide a child who is without related carers with a nurturing and safe home environment. There was a general policy among both state and voluntary welfare structures of exploring possibilities for placement in the extended family before looking at non-kin placements. In the 1980s the government started insisting that a relative who cared for children should receive a State Maintenance Grant rather than a Foster Care Grant. This policy was successfully opposed by child welfare organisations because State Maintenance Grants had a much lower value. It is the case now that many children are in the foster care of relatives. It is impossible, with present information systems, to estimate the numbers in kin, rather than non-kin, care.

The application process is complex and often lengthy, involving a full social work assessment of the applicant family and interviews with the child. Once a child has been placed in foster care, regular contact with the social worker is supposed to take place, to ensure the necessary support, to deal with problems, to facilitate contact between the child and the birth parents, and to promote reunification of the family if possible. Regular reports must be submitted by the social worker throughout the child's stay to ensure renewal of the court order and continuation of the grant.

The Foster Care Grant is not means tested in the same way that other grants are. Fostering is not seen as a poverty issue; society recompenses some of the costs of a non-parent in caring for a child. The child's income is taken into consideration - this could be from a trust fund, for example, or contributions from the child's biological parents. If the child's income per annum exceeds twice the annual value of the Foster Care Grant then no grant is paid. If it is less, then the full grant is paid.

Approximately 55 000 Foster Care Grants were being paid in 1995, amounting to approximately R200 million annually. A small number of beneficiaries of Foster Care Grants also receive State Maintenance Grants: they look after their own and other people's children.

No racial breakdown of beneficiaries is available at national level. It has been difficult for African people to access the Foster Care Grant because of bureaucratic obstacles placed in their way, and because continued payment of the grant, once it has been secured, is unreliable. This fairly commonly leads to the collapse of placements and, often, the institutionalisation of the children concerned. Where there is no institutional care available such children have simply ended up destitute on the streets, to the ultimate cost of the police, justice and prison systems, and to society as a whole.

Provinces report that there is an increase in the number of people applying for Foster Care Grants. In KwaZulu-Natal this is felt to be linked to the growing numbers of AIDS orphans. Foster care interventions are the main example of the statutory work which private welfare organisations do for government. Urban-based social workers in child welfare agencies say they spend the majority of their time - many say as much as 80% of it - placing children in foster care, and then following through with supervision. Much of this time is occasioned by lengthy delays in the Children's Court procedures.

Foster placement is intended to be a temporary means of support and care until a permanent place can be found in an appropriate person's home, through adoption procedures. Most children needing fostering and adoption come from, and are likely to be placed in, poorer communities. Many foster parents would like to adopt their foster children, and integrate them fully into their families as one of their own. The lack of subsidy for adoption, however, makes them remain 'temporary' foster parents until the child reaches adulthood, with the child and the foster family thereby locked permanently onto the welfare rolls.

9.4 The Care Dependency Grant

The policy intention to keep children cared for in their own homes can also be seen in the provision, under mental health legislation, for the Care Dependency Grant (formerly called the Single Care Grant and then the Special Care Grant). This was to enable the full time care, in their own homes, of children with severe mental impairment. The Social Assistance Act of 1992 makes children with severe physical disability eligible for the grant as well.

The rationale for the Care Dependency Grant was that if support were not given at home, the child would inevitably be admitted to full time institutional care, at a much greater cost to the state. The rationale is reflected in direct and concrete terms in the formula used for the Means Test by the former House of Assembly: E = R - (B + C), where E is the amount to be paid, R is the ceiling, and is the (1995) R27 055 annual state subsidy to a child in institutional care, B is parents' income, and C is parents' assets.

The existence of this grant has been little known outside the former 'own affairs' administrations, and to some extent in the old provincial departments delivering welfare to African people. The procedures surrounding application were extraordinarily complex, requiring assessment by so many professional personnel that the grant was de facto impossible to get outside of a well-resourced urban situation. No central records were kept.

The Care Dependency Grant used to be applied for through the Department of Health, and commonly administered through the Department of Justice, through the Magistrate's Courts. Justice would draw the money from the bank; the mother signed a voucher and received the money; the Magistrate's Court sent the voucher back to Health, which would reimburse Justice for the actual amount of the grant but not for the administrative costs involved - a matter of persistent concern to the Department of Justice.

The Care Dependency Grant has now been delegated to the Department of Welfare, which will deal with the grant in its entirety. The provincial welfare departments have had to approach magistrate's courts individually to establish how many Care Dependency Grants they have inherited. Some provinces have already reviewed all their cases; others still do not know where the files are. Figures which appear to be reliable, and which give an idea of the order of magnitude of these Care Dependency Grants, are that Gauteng has just less than 954 cases, most of which are African; Free State has 354, of which 332 are African and 23 white or Coloured; the Durban region of KwaZulu-Natal has about 850.

As the rationale for the Care Dependency Grant is different from that of other social security benefits in the field of child and family care, the Committee decided not to investigate it in more detail than presented here. The Committee will recommend that it continue in its present form.

9.5 Institutional care

The third level of state provision is the per capita grant for institutional care. This operated in conjunction with loans on generous terms, for example from the old Department of Community Development for the setting up of residential facilities including children's homes, and with back-up from the health care and education systems. Rates exemptions for social service properties also promoted the viability of these establishments - as well as that of a range of facilities with a preventive orientation.

In theory, the state welfare authorities regarded institutional care for children as a last resort. In practice, however, it has been easier to obtain reliable and consistent funding both from the state and the private sector for institutional care, than for the social work support systems required for foster care or for supportive work with biological families. Hence the building of new institutions became the routine response of many concerned citizens who wanted to assist abused, neglected or abandoned children.

Coloured children were an exception to this tendency because of a specific policy decision in the relevant race-based state structure to promote foster care rather than institutional care. The welfare movement in the Indian community itself built many children's homes and institutions. African children had very limited access either to Foster Care Grants or to institutions, and virtually none at all to Maintenance Grants, and remained largely unserved at all levels.

9.6 Personal social services

Social workers have been extensively involved in the investigations surrounding most of the grants in the fields of child and family care. The grant has thus been buttressed by counselling, supervision, therapeutic programmes for those in need, and often group work with foster parents, or for beneficiaries of the State Maintenance Grant. Other activities such as youth and recreation have also been offered by social workers.

9.7 Additional forms of support in the past

Additional forms of support which made grants and pensions a viable form of income for white people under apartheid were free and compulsory education for white children; free medical care for child and adult grantees; and low-cost housing for some. The housing took the form of accommodation on municipal housing estates at nominal rentals, and also some state housing for white families where there was provision for ultimate purchase of the dwelling at a very low price after a period of rental. Rent control was a further form of protection for many pensioners and grantees.

10 The costs of child care in different environments

The right place for children to be, in most cases, is at home in an intact family where there are healthy adult relationships, a stimulating environment, and where there is sufficient income to care for the child. Some children who are unable to have such care get access, through the social services, to other placements.

Table 8 allows a comparative assessment of the costs of care in some of the different forms of provision discussed in the preceding sections. It shows the Household Subsistence Level for Bloemfontein (one of the smaller of the urban centres for which calculations were made) for young children, and then the costs of caring for a child in different tiers of provision. The steep increases in costs to the state are evident the further the child is removed from his or her own family.

Table 8: Costs of child care in different environments, March 1996

* Calculated from Potgieter (1996) using the approximate Bloemfontein average (as not-very- large city) Household Subsistence Level for a child 0 - 10 years, September 1995.

** There are provincial variations, and variations according to standard of facility. This is a lower amount.

The monthly cost of the child allowance part of the State Maintenance Grant is R125, which assists a mother with child support. This is less than half the monthly amount of the Foster Care Grant which is R288. If the child needs interim alternative care with a non-related family while a Children's Court enquiry is underway for a foster placement, the Private Place of Safety Allowance is awarded at R180 per month. If a foster placement cannot be found, the child may be admitted to institutional care. The cost to the state rises nearly threefold over the Foster Care Grant, to R850 monthly. Many institutions are unable to provide quality and individualised care and attention.

If the child does not get an institutional placement, and the welfare services lose sight of him or her, this increases the chances of his or her engaging in activities which will result in a confrontation with the law. There are insufficient secure care places of safety, thus children are housed in prisons. The cost of imprisonment is over R2 000 a month. This is extremely costly and keeps a child in the most inappropriate institution of all.

Numbers of South African children are abandoned at birth, and have to stay in hospital while Foster Care or alternative placements are found. The daily cost for the care of a child at Edendale Hospital is estimated to be R110, or R3 300 per month. This monthly amount is about the same as the annual cost to the state of a Foster Care Grant - a grant which affords the child the possibility of a loving home environment, and consistent relationships with adults and siblings.

11 Conclusion

The latter part of this Chapter has described the grants for children and families which are presently in place. They derived from a model of family life which was based on the nuclear family, where men worked and women looked after children, when divorce and single parenting were unusual.

One of the reasons why the system is so difficult to implement and so open to abuse is that the model does not fit with today's realities. For example, a mother has to declare that she is unable to trace her partner or the child's father in order to get the State Maintenance Grant. Many, knowing that the father is unemployed and will not be able to provide support, swear that they do not know where he is (see inter alia Lund et al (1996), Teixeira and Chambers (1995) and Vorster et al (1996); also personal communication with numerous social workers).

Another example demonstrates the lack of fit between the model and the reality. If a man is sentenced to six months or more in prison, the wife or mother of his children can apply for the State Maintenance Grant, and receive Social Relief while awaiting the award. On his release, the grant is automatically stopped, because two assumptions are made: the first, that he will find employment, and the second, that he will support his family. Neither necessarily holds.

Economically, equalising the grant upwards to its present level, or anything approaching such a level, is not possible. Socially, the grant in its present form and under present regulations is inappropriate in many respects, in that it has become impossible to implement. It is not easy to see how to contour it to fit the many complex shapes of family life. Faced with the unhappy choice of having to prioritise radically, in the face of scarce resources, and with the hope of establishing a basis which could be built on in future, the Committee shifted focus, and modelled its plan around a central theme: 'Follow the child.'

CHAPTER SEVEN     [Top]

RECOMMENDATIONS

1 Introduction

The magnitude of the number of South Africans excluded from the State Maintenance Grants in the past means that no incremental improvements to the system are possible if equity is to be reached. The Committee was forced fundamentally to rethink the system of child and family support. In its proposal, it deviates from the comprehensive family preservation policy which welfare had in the past - but this policy in fact only applied to a limited number of South Africans. If accepted the proposals will have dire economic and social consequences for many people on the present system. The National Children's Rights Committee, which was represented on the Committee, is so strongly concerned about the change in commitment to the protection of family life that these proposals represents that it has submitted a statement for inclusion in this report. This is found in Appendix 9. The Committee holds - and hopes - that the future benefits will outweigh the short term costs, and that the proposals may form a minimum basis on which a progressively better system can be built.

The design of this Chapter covering recommendations is one of progressive focusing. A summary of the plan is given in Box 1, so that it can be seen holistically. A more detailed idea of the elements of the plan are given below. Some elements warrant greater coverage, and are covered as substantive issues.

2 Chief element of the proposals

2.1 Reform of the parental maintenance system

The chief objective of this reform is to switch the signals which the judicial and welfare maintenance system are giving to parents, particularly fathers. There must be a change in the social climate towards promoting parental financial responsibility, which insists that there is a cost to having children. At the moment, inadequacies in both private and state systems combine to undermine the legitimacy of financial support.

Direct saving to the welfare budget is not the primary objective of this reform in the short term, though savings will be made. It is impossible, given the present state of information held by the Departments of either Justice or Welfare, to estimate projected savings to the state through this route. Computerisation forms a central plank of the proposed reforms, and ongoing monitoring will take place to count the costs. The reforms will place an extra strain, in the short term, on an already stretched judicial system.

Box 1: Summary of Recommendations

Practical ways forward have been outlined in some detail in Chapter 5:

• The Committee was instrumental in forging agreements between key stakeholders as to needed reforms (see Appendix 7 and Appendix 8). The suggestions have been forwarded to the Department of Justice for urgent action in respect of some of the administrative aspects. A copy was forwarded to the South African Law Commission for consideration in their investigation into what legislative changes are necessary. A third copy was sent, at their request, to the South African Police Services for attention to issues which fall under their control.
• Government departments and organisations in civil society should contribute to the changed climate around child maintenance by conducting a maintenance campaign. There is a great deal of popular support for this, and the Department of Welfare could play a catalysing or a collaborative role. Tactical ideas used in other countries were presented in Chapter 5.
• There needs to be information sharing between magistrate's offices, so that the innovative ideas which have been used in some offices can be shared more widely. These include the use of tracer agents, complaints phone lines, and child care services at or near the courts for the convenience of parents who spend hours in the courts.
• A research initiative is needed which concentrates on maintenance in rural areas.

2.2 'Follow the child': the introduction of a flat-rate child benefit

The Parent Allowance portion of the State Maintenance Grant should be phased out over a period of five years to allow for the financing of a new grant, the child support benefit.

This will be paid to children of specified ages (Section 4.3 gives more detail about this). The Committee's preferred option was 0 - 9 years old.

Date of establishment: A date of establishment of the benefit would have to be decided on. There would be merit in choosing a date with high symbolic value, such as when the new Constitution takes effect in January 1997.

The Committee was seriously divided on an important issue of implementation. Once a date is chosen, a decision must be made as to whether all children born as of that date would qualify, or whether all children of a certain age group at that date would qualify. Some argued that if it were phased in as children were born, the costs would be felt incrementally as the State Maintenance Grant was being phased out, and it would be administratively far easier to implement. Others found this quite unacceptable, argued strongly for all of the specified age group to be immediately covered from the date of establishment of the benefit, and proposed that bridging finance should be found to cover the hump.

Primary care-giver: The benefit will be paid to the primary care-giver, and will be payable for all children who qualify under a simple means test. The proposal thus does away with the limit to the number of children per parent.

Registration of birth: The child's birth would have to be registered to qualify for the benefit. The Committee is aware that it is difficult in some parts of the country to find appropriate registering offices, and that distances are great, and transport expensive. Nevertheless the Committee is of the view that it should lend its support to other sectors in society who wish to promote good civil information systems. South Africans must learn to see it as a normal part of civic duty to register as a citizen, and that there are certain points in life when a person has the legal obligation to link up with the national information system.

Health activities: The care-giver should be obliged to engage in certain health related activities in relation to the child/ren in her/his care for the grant to be awarded, and for the grant to continue. The most likely possibilities are growth monitoring, and ensuring that the child is fully immunised. (Section 4.2 has more discussion of the options.)

Delivery: The ideal to aim for is a system that is simple, computerised, and with the least opportunity for abuse. The benefit should be transferred into a bank or post office on a quarterly basis, and drawn whenever the care-giver wishes, in whatever amounts. One advantage of this is that it is the most efficient and cost-effective way possible of delivering a small amount of money. It would also go some way towards contributing to the overall development goal of enabling marginalised rural people, especially women, to engage with local formal financial institutions.

The Committee is well aware of the distances many rural people live from town centres. However most people do go to centres from time to time, and it is felt that the benefits to be gained outweigh the disadvantages and inconvenience. A monthly cash payout is the least favoured option.

2.3 Continuation of the Care Dependency Grant

This grant is payable to the carers of children whose intellectual and physical impairment is so profound that they require full time care. It directly saves the costs of much more expensive institutional care. The grant should continue.

2.4 Continuation of the Foster Care Grant

There will be new demands on the Foster Care Grant with the spread of HIV/ AIDS. As the Foster Care Grant will be a higher amount than the child support benefit, some care-givers may apply for the Foster Care Grant. The Committee cannot resolve this problem. The Foster Care Grant already takes an enormous amount of time from social workers, and the courts are stretched to capacity. Yet the Foster Care Grant is a vital lifeline for the care of children with no parents, and the grant must be protected.

For the Foster Care Grant not to be abused, monitoring and screening will be needed. There are many aspects of foster care placement and follow up which social workers suggest could be undertaken by people with lower qualifications. The Council for Social Work should be asked as a matter of urgency to review Foster Care Grant procedures with a view to being more flexible about who can oversee them.

2.5 The development of a strategic position for the welfare sector on HIV/ AIDS.

The Department of Welfare should deliberately calculate how much of the costs of caring for people affected by HIV/ AIDS - those with the disease, and those orphaned or abandoned by it - it will absorb, and what the responsibilities of other departments and sectors are. If this is not done, within five years the welfare sector, in terms of financing and provision, will have little capacity to do anything other than respond to HIV/ AIDS.

2.6 The creation of new links between social security and social work personnel

All provincial departments of welfare should be asked to scrutinise the chapter on social security in the Draft White Paper on Welfare, and report annually as to steps that have been taken to integrate social security with developmental social welfare. In particular a new reporting mechanism should be developed which keeps an account of people who have been assisted to come off the social security system into developmental programmes.

The national department has a role in setting up the unit suggested in the White Paper: a small streamlined unit containing an energetic individual or two whose role it is to keep up to date with new training initiatives, new resources for social and community workers, new trends in industry and agriculture which hold potential for developmental social welfare. This information should then be regularly and speedily sent out to the provinces.

The Department and/or such a unit also has a key role to play in negotiating with other agencies such as the Skills Academy of the Department of Labour to provide opportunities for people who will be phased out of the existing State Maintenance Grant. It should do the same with the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs, hoping to make the extension services more relevant to the needs of poor people. The Department of Welfare itself cannot hope to take responsibility for the welfare of all the people who will be affected.

Provinces should either set up such units themselves, or build on the ideas for collaboration presented in Section 9 of Chapter 4.

2.7 Forging links between welfare, social security, poverty alleviation and other development programmes

The present efforts by many social workers to change their orientation towards development social welfare should be applauded and supported. The Department, with its new emphasis on communications, could assist organisations in getting publicity for their good programmes.

Non-governmental organisations and community based organisations perceive that the Department of Welfare has a great deal of information about resources for development - training courses, sources of equipment, funding sources, and so on - which would be useful to them. The Department could consider including in its regular newsletter factual information about development-related resources.

The proposed child support benefit will offer a number of opportunities for women and men to organise around child care activities. The national and provincial departments should make an early start in exploring possibilities with communities.

The Flagship Programme places an emphasis on monitoring and evaluating its pilot projects, and intends to do a rigorous financial cost/benefit analysis. These could be developed as case study material to educate others in the welfare sector about how to measure effectiveness.

The Department of Welfare should be in permanent contact with the Early Childhood Development sector with a view to pursuing possibilities for the employment of poor women in early childhood development programmes.

2.8 Promotion of reproductive health services and life skills education

The welfare sector needs to find some response to the popular concern about the lack of accessible information in this society about sexual behaviour, gender relations, child spacing, and so on. It should contribute actively to the calls for the development of reproductive health services, and for the spread of life skills and sex education in and out of schools. Many social workers are already doing such life skills work in innovative programmes. The Department of Welfare could make a special effort to disseminate lessons learned from their experience.

2.9 Promotion of changes in the social work curriculum and in the understanding of economics of welfare and social security

The shift towards developmental social welfare carries the risk that some of the basic, ongoing primary welfare tasks will lose their status, and the training in those tasks will likewise suffer. The full range of tasks within the new paradigm, including the statutory and other tertiary functions, should be re-assessed with a view to redefining the personnel needs of the sector and re-shaping social work and community development curricula accordingly.

The Council for Social Work has substantial control over the training of social workers and some community workers. The Council should be asked to review the social work curriculum as a matter of urgency. University departments of social work should be invited annually to review and monitor their changing course content and practical placements.

Schools of Business Administration should be approached and asked to design and deliver short courses in the economics of welfare and social security. These will appeal to a wide range of people outside welfare as well. Such an initiative is likely to receive the financial backing of the insurance industry.

2.10 Promotion of research in the field of social policy, social security, and the economics of welfare

South Africa's lack of tradition of policy-oriented study of the welfare and social security fields is a real obstacle to the planning of better systems. This combines with the seriously inadequate demographic and household data that there has been, as well as the lack of reliable income and expenditure data, and few analyses of women's unpaid work and intra-household decision-making. It is a fertile field for work. The Department has a limited role in doing the research itself. It can however bring the need for such work to the attention of a range of departments at universities: economics, political science, gender studies, sociology, actuarial science, anthropology, social work, to name a few obvious ones.

3 Substantive issues

3.1 Means Testing

The Committee initially reached consensus that there was a strong argument to be made for making the proposed benefit a universal one - that it should not be means tested, but should go to all South African children. This was for reasons of efficiency: given the pattern of South Africa's income distribution, with many poor people and few who are very well off, a means test spends too much time concentrating on keeping a few out, rather than drawing more people in. It was also for administrative simplicity. It would be of high symbolic value: 'all South African children are important'.

However, there is a strong political and moral favouring of means testing in society as a whole, as a mechanism for excluding the rich while the levels of inequality are so extreme. Furthermore, having done the first calculations for possible level of the benefit on a universal basis, it became clear that some form of income assessment will have to be done.

The test should be as simple as possible, and the Committee suggests asking a simple question of the caregiver as to whether her/ his income is above Rx, and, if a partner is present in the household, whether that person has a regular income such as to make the combined income more than twice Rx.

The means test must not in any way depend on a definition of a family. The concept 'Follow the child' via the primary care-giver solves the administrative problem of family definition. It would undermine the entire proposal to re-introduce the problem via the form of the means test.

Another possibility for assessing eligibility would be using the nutritional status of the child.

3.2 The link with positive health behaviour

The proposed child support benefit has the potential to develop synergy between social security, social welfare and health as an integral part of basic primary health care and primary welfare care.

The great majority of South African children are born using the health services; of those who do not, some choose not to, but most have not been able to afford to in the past. The Free Health Care Policy is removing affordability as a barrier. Most of those who do come in contact with the health services do so around the time of birth. Then the great majority of them 'disappear' to the health system.

The child support benefit could be made conditional on the care-giver and child participating in one or two critically important health-related behaviours. These must not have punitive consequences: it must not lead to the unintended exclusion of the very people one wishes to include. The activities must be ones which the health services themselves see as essential to their policy. There could be some provincial discretion about the form this should take, depending on the state of development of the District Health Services.

One possibility is growth monitoring. This forms an essential part of the primary health care package, and is designed for children in the younger years. It is simple, requires no expensive technology, and it is or should be non-punitive. It might also be a screening mechanism for better-off people: a way of excluding those who will find the inconvenience of queuing in a health centre outweighs the value placed on the amount of the benefit. Early warning about declining nutritional status of a child or children in a particular household could allow health staff to refer to social or other development workers.

The other condition, favoured by many, is to place the responsibility on the care-giver to keep up the full immunisation status of the child or children in her or his care. A national survey undertaken by the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (Hirschowitz and Orkin, 1995) shows about half of all South African children having incomplete coverage, about a quarter having complete coverage, and, disturbingly, about a quarter of respondents not being able to answer the question for the children in the household. Immunisation is a critically important preventive measure, with measurable savings to individuals, the economy and the health services if it is done effectively.

Some religious groups refuse immunisation or vaccination, as it is against their belief system, and they can claim an infringement of religious freedom. Some few individuals object on the grounds that it is an invasion of human rights. Such groups are on the whole small, commonly not in the poorer section of the population, and an exception could simply be made for them.

The proposals would not place undue strain on the health service. The Health Ministry would need to take the lead in decisions about the critical activities and moments. It could be designed in such a way that a care-giver needs to present the child to the health services at birth, once after registration of the birth to start the benefit, and twice thereafter, at critical moments, over the years the grant is awarded. Continuation of the award would be conditional on this positive health behaviour.

3.3 Age of eligibility for the benefit

There are two ways of approaching the years of eligibility for a benefit: one is to concentrate on the objectives of a benefit in terms of what years in the life cycle a child will be most vulnerable, or conversely, at what ages intervention will be most effective. Secondly, the age can be used as a cost containment measure. Ideally, one would like to cover all children of all ages. However with a particular estimate of current fiscal constraints, what is the minimum that could be covered now, and under what conditions can eligibility be extended to higher age cohorts?

The inclusive approach 0 - 16 or 18: The past South African age limit for the State Maintenance Grant was 18, extended to 21 if the child continues into tertiary education. Under the new regulations, this is 18, or up to 21 if the child is still completing secondary school (a high number of South Africans only complete secondary education in their 20s).This is among the highest ages of eligibility for child support through social security in the world. It is also the case however that in other developed countries, services and resources come for children through other departments, such as training schemes, and support for tertiary education.

The South African early childhood development approach 0 - 9: Many South African children living in poor households and environments do not start school at the 'normal' age of 6, but commonly start at 7 or 8 or even 9 years of age.

The pre-school years approach 0 - 6: The logic behind support to these years is the similar one of nurturing, access to health, and adequate nutrition. Additionally, support should be provided to the point where the child comes into contact with another institution - the primary school. Such an institution could be a vehicle for other forms of support such as nutrition schemes, and preventive health services.

The minimal approach 0 - 4: Here some would argue that the first four years of a child's life are critically important in terms of consistent nurturing, attention to health problems, and adequate nutrition.

The consensus in the Committee was that 0 - 9 would be the preferred option, bearing in mind child development needs and the need for fiscal responsibility. This age would see the majority of children inside the school system, where other programmes and forms of support could come into play. In the face of the projected costs, it unwillingly faces the choice of cutting back the number of years (or foregoing the benefit altogether). The 0 - 4 age range is the absolute minimum which should be considered; it should be loudly declared as the minimum, and the age increased as fiscal circumstances permit.

3.4 The level of the benefit

A set of calculations was made which combined different variables, so that different options could be costed out. It must be noted that these calculations are simply indicative: they give a broad outline of what is possible. Population figures used were those of the Demographic Information Bureau (DIB). The Central Statistical Services (CSS) has accepted DIB's figures as the most reliable ones available, pending the results of the 1996 Census. They are substantially higher than the estimates used in, for example, the PSLSD survey. The estimates for percentages of children which could be reached using various levels and age cohorts are thus very conservative. The Committee chose this cautious approach to provide a realistic framework for planning, and to demonstrate the impact that incremental increases in budgetary amounts can make.

Two levels of the benefit were set:

1 R70 monthly, based approximately on the Household Subsistence Level for children.

2 R125 monthly, which is the present level of the child allowance part of the State Maintenance Grant.

Three ages of eligibility were set:

1. 0 - 4 years
2. 0 - 6 years
3. 0 - 9 years

Three budgetary amounts were set:

1. R1.2 billion: the approximate amount presently spent on the State Maintenance Grant
2. R1.5 billion: an approximate mid-point for comparative purposes
3. R2 billion: assuming that more money could be allocated as a trade-off for the loss of the State Maintenance Grant, or that all savings made from the clean up of the fraud in the present social security system would be allocated to this benefit, or that other sources of funding such as lottery money could be forthcoming, or that there would be a shift in spending priorities.

Table 9 gives a clear indication of the choices available. If a restricted number of years were chosen, 0 - 4, then within present budgetary limits 24% or about one quarter of children could be reached with a monthly benefit of R70. With a modest addition, to R1.5 billion, 29% of children of those ages could be covered.

Table 9: Percentages of children who would be reached using varying age cohorts, monthly levels of benefit, and annual budgetary requirements (ages in 1997/98)

If the higher number of years, 0 - 9 were chosen, and the benefit had to fall within the present budget, then only 13% of children could be reached with R70 per month. If more resources could be found, and the budgetary limit stretched to R2 billion, then nearly 40% of children between 0 and 4 could be reached with a monthly R70.

To convey a sense of the different outcomes using different data sources: if the PSLSD estimates were used, the percentage of 0 - 4 year olds who could be reached within present budgetary limits would increase to 33% with a R70 a month payment. Should the budget be increased to R2 billion, funds would be available for 55% of the children in the 0 - 4 cohort.

More detailed tables, using DIB figures, and giving inter alia the numbers of children involved, can be found in Appendix 10.

4 Anticipated negative consequences of the proposal

The proposal carries a high social and economic cost for those on the current system. The Committee wishes to record that the proposal will have negative consequences for many. Women presently receiving the State Maintenance Grant, especially those in their 40s and 50s who will have difficulty in finding alternative sources of income, will be desperately affected. More young people will have to work for the upkeep of their families, and this will affect their schooling and influence their future ability to be independently productive. The present pressure on grandmothers to care for grandchildren will increase. The already stressed Old Age Pension will have to do more work in household support.

The morale of social security staff is already at a low ebb because of the delays in implementing the new regulations. They are harassed, justifiably, by old and new applicants. If the proposals here are accepted, there will be a need for full information to be given to all levels of staff.

5 Conclusion

The Committee has found it exacting to try to balance the best interests of children, as South Africa's future investment, against demographic realities, economic constraints, and constitutional rights. The recommendations are in line with ensuring essential minimum levels required by the Convention of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and in line with the interim and new constitution, by trying to protect the poorest children in their most vulnerable years. If children do not receive basic food, clothing and shelter during these years, their ability to exercise other fundamental human rights in later years is severely restricted.

This is a small section of South Africa's needy children, and it detracts from resources certain women and children are presently getting. On the other hand the proposed benefit, though small, would have a considerable redistributive impact by shifting limited resources to particularly poor households in rural areas. If economic growth takes place, or priorities shift, progressive steps can be taken from this base of social security. On balance, the Committee felt that the introduction of this benefit, in the short term, holds a greater potential for the protection of more children over the medium and longer term, than the alternatives which were considered.

The Department of Welfare, and the welfare sector as a whole, will not be able to cope with the outcome of this country's century of dis-welfares, at the same time as shifting to developmental social welfare. The recommendations start with advocating the reform of the judicial maintenance system as one way of promoting the responsibility of individual parents. Chapter 8 will indicate some of the other inter-sectoral work which will be needed with other departments if the plan is accepted.

CONCLUSION

1 Introduction

The work of the Committee finishes on presentation of this report. If the overall proposals are accepted, some matters will need attention in order to increase the ease with which the changes can be implemented.

2 Opportunities for public comment and participation

The six month period granted to the Committee to do its work made it inevitable that there would be limited opportunity for public participation and consultation. Because of this, the Committee gained the agreement of MINMEC at the outset that the report could be disseminated to the public. The Committee knows that the recommendations will be controversial. It firmly believes that a public understanding that there is no possibility of extending the present system is the best way to win acceptance of the changes. The Committee thus recommends vigorous dissemination of the Report.

If any recommendations are accepted which have financial or legislative implications, they will be routed from MINMEC to Parliament. If the recommendations then go to the Portfolio Committee on Welfare, and the Joint Standing Committee on Finance, there may be opportunities for public hearings.

3 Implications for the Department of Welfare

3.1 During the period covered by the Committee, applications for State Maintenance Grants under the new regulations were being accepted, but were not being processed because of the delays in the creation of one uniform computerised system for social security. If the main recommendation for phasing out the State Maintenance Grants over a period of five years is accepted, those on the system under the old regulations, as well as those presently in-waiting will be affected.

The Department will need to take steps to ensure that the public is fully informed of proposed changes, so that present beneficiaries, old and in-waiting, are aware of the impact this will have on their economic situation.

3.2 The Committee is aware that the Department is concerned about the inadequate state of its information management in the field of social security, and that a set of committees has been established to address the problem. This Committee wishes to add its voice to the concern. It is absolutely imperative for the planning of a coherent system to have consistent and reliable basic data. It is also imperative to have a close feedback loop between the national level and the provincial levels.

3.3 The Committee feels that the strength and status of the Department of Welfare, and of the welfare sector as a whole, would be enhanced if it consistently articulated what it is and is not responsible for. The recommendations in this report go some way towards saying, for example, that Welfare cannot continue to pick up the social security tab for a judicial system which fails to extract from parents financial support for their children. Likewise, social security benefits are being used to subsidise school fees for the education system.

4 Collaboration with the Department of Health

The main recommendation for the introduction of a child support benefit involves a synergistic relationship with the Department of Health. The Committee talked with health personnel in various places to establish what the possible windows of opportunity were for a child benefit to be used to promote the kind of health-related behaviour which would be in line with changing health policy. The Committee could not, of course, make any formal approach at the national level to the Department of Health. This should be done as a matter of urgency so that the Department of Health fully understands the conceptualisation behind the proposal, and the potential advantages to the health sector of the proposal, and so that the two Departments can work together in developing the plan.

5 Collaboration with the Department of Justice

The workshop organised by the Committee in conjunction with the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit generated consensus on a number of reforms needed in the judicial maintenance system. Some of these have very limited cost and/or staffing implications, and could be implemented forthwith. Others will take longer to act on. The report on the proposed reforms has been forwarded to the Department of Justice and the South African Law Commission (Appendix 8), and further liaison by MINMEC may be needed.

The phasing out of the State Maintenance Grant will have the inevitable consequence that more women will approach the judicial maintenance system for support from the fathers of their children. The Department of Justice will need to be alerted to this.

The Committee noted with concern that the tenders for computerisation in Justice in connection with the maintenance system are being done in isolation from the Department of Welfare's computerisation. It is critically important that these systems are able to 'speak to each other', for monitoring and for the referral of people between systems.

6 Collaboration with the Department of Home Affairs

The Department of Welfare has been a major actor in the inter-departmental initiative to establish a national information system for the registration of all South African citizens. The main impetus for this came, within Welfare, from a concern to regularise and make more efficient the delivery of Old Age Pensions, and to eliminate the financial abuse of this system. The Department has thus been largely pre-occupied with the registration of older South Africans.

If the recommendations of this Committee are accepted, their implementation will be made much easier, and more efficient, and more resistant to intended or unintended abuse, once the registration of all South African births is made routine. The Committee would thus strongly endorse the establishment of the national registration system, with the registration of child births as a high national priority.

The inter-departmental committees working on this system, and in particular the Department of Home Affairs, will thus need to be informed of the proposals for a child benefit.

7 Collaboration with the Department of Education

Schools are the logical site for the employment of numbers of social workers, who can reach children, teachers and the surrounding community in a cost-effective way. Obvious programmes would revolve around the prevention of child abuse, dealing with traumatised children in areas affected by violence, life skills training, the prevention of drug and alcohol dependency, the promotion of positive gender attitudes, training in non-violent conflict resolution, and the like. The integration of such work into school schedules should be discussed with the Department of Education.

The Department of Education controls decisions over the Early Childhood Development subsidy. The importance of the subsidy for younger children has been discussed in the report as vital for children's development, and as a locus for the employment of women. The social services budget of the Department of Welfare currently supports part of such inadequate early childhood provision as currently exists. Both Departments need to plan in collaboration with each other.

8 Promotion of an understanding of the links between social welfare, social security and development

The MINMEC and the Department of Welfare will experience, as one outcome of this Committee's report, the deep and pervasive lack of understanding that there is, at all levels of society, about the positive economic role played by social security for households in poverty. There is also limited understanding of the economic role of women in reproducing society. And there is limited understanding by people working in the welfare sector about how the economy functions.

The Communications section of the Department could start right away with the development of materials in this regard, possibly drawing from the contents of this report. A middle term strategy, easily done, would be for a small streamlined inter-departmental task group to be formed, comprising individuals from civil society as well, which could devise the outlines of a course of study, and request universities to plan for it in their curricula for students and in their adult education programmes.

9 Conclusion

This report cover the Terms of Reference given to the Committee, and proposals are made which are in line with changing welfare policy, which could shift scarce welfare resources decisively towards poorer South Africans, and which are well within the limits of fiscal responsibility, as well as being administratively feasible.

There are a number of choices regarding the way in which the proposals could be implemented which were not explored. The Committee felt that this largely technical work should only take place if the proposals find broad acceptance.

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