Initially (as discussed below), empirical research focused on impact evaluations to establish the effectiveness of social cash transfers and of alternative design choices (e.g. The literature on social protection has also grown and evolved during this period. Millions of Africans who had no access to social assistance twenty years ago now receive social cash transfers (SCTs) from their governments every month (UNDP 2019).
At the continental level, no African country had a national social protection policy in 2000, but thirty-five of fifty-five had produced one by 2019.
At the global level, social protection was not mentioned in the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, but it features in three Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations 2015). Since the late 1990s, a particular form of social protection has become entrenched in the social policy agenda across the world. This chapter is an amended version of a working paper co-published by the SOCIUM Research Centre on Inequality and Social Policy and the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy”, University of Bremen, and the UK Institute of Development Studies (Devereux 2020). Questions arise about whether the adoption of social protection by African governments should be understood as a nationally owned or “donor-driven” process. Nonetheless, some governments resisted these pressures and inducements, because their political interests and national priorities were not well aligned with the agendas of development agencies. Such tactics included generating empirical evidence that cash transfers have beneficial impacts, financing social protection programmes, building state capacity to deliver social protection, and commissioning national social protection policies. These agencies acted as “policy pollinators,” using various tactics to persuade African governments to implement social protection programmes. This chapter focuses on the instrumental role of international development agencies in the rapid and sustained rise of social protection as a policy agenda throughout Africa in the early twenty-first century.
0 kommentar(er)
