Africa’s Social Policy Trajectories: South Africa

Abstract

While the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on South African women has been highlighted, it
is the depth and breadth of social policies that existed prior to the pandemic and the extent to which they
addressed gender that aggravated or ameliorated the plight of women along racial, ethnic and geographical
contours. In order to understand how an outbreak of a pandemic interfaced with the existing social policy
architecture and the concomitant gendered outcomes, this study adopts a process tracing strategy tracking the
trajectory of social policy development in South Africa, starting from the establishment of the Union of South
Africa in 1910, through the apartheid and post-independence periods up to the outbreak of the COVID-19
pandemic. While the legacies of colonialism and apartheid remain important, the character of social policies in
South Africa at the time COVID-19 struck was largely a product of the ideational values and ideological
underpinnings of social policymaking and development in the post-independence period. The latter proposition
forms the crux of this study and opens up the possibility of implementing gender transformative social policies in
post-COVID-19 South Africa. The ideological inconsistency of the post-independence black majority
government is reflected in its abandonment of the leftist, people-oriented, social democratic rooted
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) barely two years into democratic rule to embrace a liberal
democratic ideology represented by its adoption of GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) as the
country’s guiding economic blueprint. This switch has left an imprint on the kind of social policies pursued.
Using a gender lens, this paper illustrates the above, drawing examples from five social policy sectors, namely land
and agrarian reform; work and employment; education; health and lastly, social assistance. While the RDP had an
ambitious target of redistributing 30% of good farmland to black Africans within five years of independence, by
2016, a paltry 5.3% had been redistributed, with only 28.9% of land reform beneficiaries being women. A similar
pattern was observable regarding work and employment. Despite female labour force participation closely
matching that of their male counterparts, a feat coming at a cost to women due to the absence of the state in
shaping women’s experience of the ‘everyday’, pay differentials between women and men remain stubbornly high
at 25% in a highly gender-segregated labour market. A gender transformative social policy analysis of the liberaloriented
Child Support Grant (CSG), which represent the largest tax-funded social assistance in the country and
throughout the continent, reveals a prioritisation of the poverty of children more than that of their mothers. Postindependence
educational policies have failed dismally to universalise quality education despite huge state
resources being channelled towards historically black schools. Only the National Health Insurance (NHI) remains
promising as an indicator of the universalist approach to social policy in South Africa. It’s ideological
underpinnings, if applied to education, social security; land and agrarian reform, is the surest way for a genderequitable
and transformative South Africa post-COVID-19.

Keywords: gender-equitable, transformative social policy, GETSPA, South Africa, COVID-19