A social safety net comprising small cash grants can mitigate extreme poverty
After her husband died, Chimwemwe was kicked out of their marriage home in Malawi. On returning destitute to her parents’ village with her two mentally disabled daughters, she found her former home in ruins.
Through scrupulous management of her tiny income she uplifted her household from penury to profit, providing perhaps one of the most compelling stories I came across while working in 2009-2010 in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana and SA for the UK’s international development department, examining examples of how a social safety net comprising small cash grants can mitigate extreme poverty.
Osman says that in her experience social grants need to come with conditions to ensure the grants are spent on households, not in taverns, though many studies show that poor people are generally more careful with their savings and spending than those who are better off. A study of options to cost a BIG, released in September by Stellenbosch University’s Dr Hylton Hollander and research associates Daan Steenkamp and Roy Havemann, examined various scenarios. The first includes the possibility of converting the R350 a monthThis, they argue, “is estimated to require an increase in public debt of about three percentage points of GDP after five years.
The model predicts job losses amounting to about 200,000. These come about because of the fiscal impact of a permanent increase in spending .” As I was looking at social grants in Southern Africa, Namibia was concluding a BIG pilot at a 1,000-strong impoverished settlement north of Windhoek, where unconditional R100 a person a month grants were paid over 12 months to nonpensioners.
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