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Marion Ouma is a research associate with the South Africa Research Chair Initiative (SARChl) on Social Policy at the University of South Africa, where she also completed her PhD. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa institute, Uppsala, Sweden and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her research interests include social policy, social protection, policymaking and the political economy of Africa’s development.

For issue #129 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from her chapter, 'Re-defining Social Policy in Africa in the Era of Cash Transfers' from the book Can Africans Do Economics? (Inkani Press, 2025). In this excerpt, Ouma explains the implementation of cash transfer programs that began as a trend two decades ago as a response to the economic crises caused by structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s.

Today, most African nations have some sort of cash transfer programme in place, perhaps the culmination of a trend that started two decades ago. In some countries, multiple cash transfers are rolled out at the same time. In Kenya, for example, under the National Safety Net Programme the government is implementing the Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, the Hunger Safety Net Programme and the Older Persons Cash Transfer Programme. In-country these programmes are implemented by governments in partnership with international NGOs. The influence of international organisations on African social policy, however, has a longer history.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, African countries underwent economic and social reforms popularly referred to as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). The reforms followed a period of sustained growth and improvement in the living standards of Africans after independence. With independence, governments across the continent made intentional effort to improve the welfare of their citizens. To achieve this, investment was made in education, health and agriculture resulting in a rise in education attainment, a reduction in child mortality rates and general improvement in nutrition. Sociologist Jimi Adésínà demonstrates how investment in social expenditure by governments in Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria improved health outcomes in the three countries.

Coming from the colonial period when basic social services were provided based on race or through employment, post-colonial governments expanded access to the basic services for previously neglected Africans. This was driven by a need to create a well-educated, healthy population capable of taking over the colonial state. Of chief importance though, was the desire to improve people’s wellbeing and dignity. The universal approach to social service provision embraced by the governments at the time, aimed to achieve developmental goals but was also undertaken as part of the nation-building agenda.

This period of state-led social policy interventions was short-lived as states were forced to cut social spending as part of structural adjustment prescriptions. According to the Bretton Woods institutions, adjustment interventions were necessitated by the wanton spending of African governments. However, this analysis of Africa’s financial and debt crisis and the policy solutions offered were faulty. As economist Jason Hickel notes, the financial crises governments found themselves in were brought about by an unequal balance of trade that endures to the present day.

The integration of African economies in global trade after independence perpetuated the extraction of African resources by merely shifting how it was conducted within a sanctioned process of globalisation. Exploitative terms of trade meant that African countries continued to be primary suppliers of raw materials in the global market while importing manufactured goods from the Global North. Within the controlled trade regime, the drop in primary commodity prices dealt a further blow to primary goods suppliers. Unable to meet both national and international debt obligations, governments had to resort to the IMF and the World Bank.

Premised on the idea of ‘cutting your coat according to your size’ the two organisations instituted SAPs where they would provide loans to governments on the basis that they undertook stabilisation, liberalisation, and privatisation of their economies. The policy prescriptions were the removal of state subsidies, cost sharing arrangements for public goods and services, selling of parastatals, retrenchment and freezes on increase of wages and government employment. Many scholars have noted that financial crises did not only affect countries in the Global South; those in the Global North were affected as well, though to a lesser extent. However, SAPs were only imposed in the Global South depicting the double standards that structure the world economy.

The result of structural adjustment was that ‘economies shrank, incomes collapsed, millions of people were dispossessed, and poverty rates shot through the roof. Global South countries lost an average of $480 billion per year in potential GDP during adjustment period.’ Due to cuts made to social spending budgets, individuals were expected to pay fees for education, medical supplies and other services previously provided by the state. Job retrenchment, privatised government parastatals and the freeze on state employment meant that many households lost their primary sources of income and could not meet their basic needs. To cope with the rising cost of living, people resorted to self-employment leading to high rates of precarious or informal labour.

The crisis deepened as it coincided with the HIV/AIDS epidemic which ravaged the continent in the 1980s and 1990s. The deepening health crisis, increased poverty levels and vulnerability resulted in a polycrisis which governments and communities found hard to manage. Meanwhile, the role of state changed from a ‘providing state’ to a ‘night watchman state’ as its role shrunk to creating a conducive environment for markets to operate.

The foundation of the current wave of social protection programmes in the form of cash transfers is a response to the effects of SAPs. With countries having to cut down social spending, poverty rates increased leading to unrest and riots in countries such as Zambia in 1986, Nigeria in 1989, Niger in 1991, and Kenya in 1990.20 This included riots by workers but also by university students protesting hikes in fees. As far back as 1987, a UNICEF report called Adjustment with Human Face, exposed the suffering brought about by SAPs on families and children. African scholars had already been challenging the suitability of SAPs in their countries, and along with activists they called for a cessation and reform of the stabilisation process.

Following the ‘success’ of cash transfers in Latin America to alleviate poverty reduction and issues such as destitution, the Bretton Woods institutions transferred the strategy to Africa in the 2000s to deal with disastrous effects of SAPs and quell the rising unrest caused by the increased cost of living. In the interim, between the independence wave of the 1960s–1970s and the 2000s, many African countries had become fully authoritarian or had leaders who stifled democracy or enforced political repression. The rising social unrest soon morphed into political agitation with the clamour for multi-party democracy at its core in places such as Zambia and Kenya. With political instability imminent, the response of the international multilateral organisations was the provision of targeted social assistance to the poorest and the concept of safety nets and cash transfers grounded in the World Bank’s Social Risk Management framework.

Cash transfers became a popular mode of support first in Latin America where the governments of Brazil and Mexico introduced the Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) and Oportunidades (or Prospera) social assistance programmes respectively. This kind of social protection intervention made its way to the continent, but it was not entirely new as South Africa and Namibia, for instance, had some forms of transfers on-going since 1928 and 1998 respectively. Starting in the early 2000s, this wave of cash transfers was introduced in Zambia with the help of GIZ (the German International Co-operation Agency) and Kenya via UNICEF. The projects at the time comprised of small pilot programmes and with time, international organisations expanded to the entirety of the African continent.

Excerpted with permission from Can Africans Do Economics? edited by Grieve Chelwa and published by Inkani Press.

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