Incorporating social policy into the development agenda in Africa

By: Thandika Mkandawire

Social policy is state intervention that directly affects social welfare, social institutions and social relations. It involves overarching concerns with redistribution, production, reproduction and protection, and works in tandem with economic policy in pursuit of national social and economic goals. It should be stressed that social policy does not merely deal with the ‘causalities’ of social changes and processes but also contributes to the welfare of society as a whole.

Social policy may be embedded in economic policy explicitly aimed at direct government provision of social welfare, in part through broad-based social services and subsidies, provision of education and health services, social security and pensions, land reform, incidence of taxation, labour market interventions, redistributive policies and so on.

The African experience
The role and stature of social policy has changed dramatically over the years. In the early post-colonial phase, social policy was a central part of the nation-building project. A number of measures were adopted, the variation in policy tending to exhibit both ‘path dependence’ (the colonial heritage and the adoption of policies and administration practices borrowed from the erstwhile colonizers) and the ideological and political choices of individual countries.

In settler economies, such as those of Zambia, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, the situation was more fraught. The colonial regimes had fairly comprehensive social insurance schemes for the white population, whose jobs were protected from outside competition: pension schemes, free or highly subsidized education and medical services and so on. The post-colonial regimes had to abolish or, at least lessen, the racial divide. Social policy was a major instrument for redressing some of the injustices of the colonial order. The difficult choice has been whether to simply abolish the segmented welfare schemes altogether or to maintain them and make them applicable to everyone. The latter option has, in the case of Zambia, posed severe fiscal challenges.

The political coalitions that had been forged during the colonial period exhibited great variation in terms of social base. Not surprisingly the ideologies behind social policy initiatives ranged from unbridled capitalist ones to idiosyncratic forms of socialism.  The authoritarian rule that became the default mode of African governments meant that social policy was top down and highly paternalistic.

Education was given a central position in social policy to further development and nation building. It was supposed not only to contribute to national cohesion but also to produce the necessary ‘manpower’ for both the indigenization of the public sector and the human skills necessary for development. In some countries,  land reform and redistribution of assets were central. In addition, most governments intervened in labour markets and introduced social policies that often guaranteed minimum wages and free health services.

Considerable progress was made in the number of social indicators, especially in terms of school enrolment and health. There were, however, a number of problems with social policy in Africa.

The first of these was the segmented nature of some of its key components. While education and health tended to be more universal, a number of social welfare measures applied only to the workers in the formal sector—referred to as ‘the labour aristocracy’ – and failed to address the poverty of the majority in the rural areas and the rapidly swelling ranks of the ‘working poor’ in the informal sector. Second, social policy was not explicitly linked to development, except perhaps through the ‘human capital’ component. Thus, for instance, the ‘forced savings’ from pensions were often used to support the current budgets of governments rather than used for long-term investment. Third, social policies were unable to cope with the rapid social differentiation that took place once the cap on economic opportunities placed on the colonized peoples was removed. In many cases such differentiation led to the undermining of the ‘social pacts’ that had informed social policy thinking in the early years. Fourth, many social policies lacked the fiscal basis for their sustainability as governments engaged in expenditures without taking into account their financial implications. And finally, many social policy initiatives eventually went under, together with the developmental strategies to which they were tethered.

In response to these failures, there was a flurry of social policy initiatives in the 1970s at both the national and international levels. The ILO introduced ‘Basic Needs Strategies’ which had both distributive and employment implications. The strategies also implied that social policy would universalize access to services that would enable citizens to meet their basic needs. The World Bank also proposed ‘growth with equity’ strategies, which were much less explicit as to the underlying social policy, but were focused on rural poverty.

The crises of the late 1970s brought all these initiatives to a sudden halt as stabilization and structural adjustment took ascendancy in policy making and the aid agencies’ agendas. The first victim of the SAPs were the claims by states that they would intervene in the economy not only to ensure economic performance but also to ensure certain economic outcomes. Together with the disappearance of poverty from the policy agenda came the disappearance of development as something that state policies deliberately pursued beyond simply overseeing the spontaneous market processes. ‘Adjustment’ became the key word. Expenditures were judged entirely in terms of immediate, fiscal or financial needs, while the long-term developmental implications were rejected or downplayed. This in itself would have sufficed to undermine social policy making, which is rooted in the real economy. Earlier developmentalist arguments for social policy as one of the key instruments of development simply vanished. During the adjustment years, many social policies were reversed, deemed guilty by association with the beleaguered development strategies. The new strategies argued for private provision of many services that the state had hitherto provided and urged user charges for any services that the state might provide. These included a whole range of services that African governments had been inclined to provide, albeit not always successfully. The new strategies also clearly spoke against labour market legislation that would distort markets. Most significantly, ‘poverty eradication’ was removed from the policy agenda.

The dethroning of the state as the driver of development led to greater reliance on social provision by social actors. Increasingly, service provision is being transferred to NGOs. Much of the commercialization of service provision is premised on the regulatory capacity of the state, the responses of the bureaucracy to the new religion of adjustment, and the development and performance of the private sector. It also ignored the historical lessons that showed that voluntary service provision would face difficulties in scaling up activities, that may have worked at the micro-level, to national level, and that voluntarism tended to entail inherent institutional limits to coverage.

There were increasing calls for ‘adjustment with a human face’, spearheaded by UNICEF. Within Africa itself there was strong opposition to the adjustment policies, where social policy was confined to ‘safety nets’ that were introduced not so much because they addressed issues of poverty but because they provided legitimacy to adjustment policies. This explains the insistence by the Bretton Wood Institutions that they be given a high profile, despite their meagreness. In response to political protests about the negative consequences of adjustment, a number of social policy measures were introduced. These included special social funds or ‘social safety nets’ and programmes ‘targeted’ at the poor.

These programmes proved wholly inadequate. By the end of the millennium, new developmental goals were a new ‘post-Washington’ consensus which suggested a new set of more encompassing programmes. In many African countries, this took the form of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which were the new social policy component of the post-Washington consensus.

There were a number of problems with these new initiatives, which have been discussed in the literature. One of these was that these programmes were not intended to interrogate the stabilization policies themselves which had contributed to the increased poverty of the ‘lost decades’. The programmes thus perpetuated the marginal role assigned to social policy. Social policy should be formulated within a policy regime framework that also includes economic policy and political regimes.

Research issues
Social policy in Africa has to address four basic challenges: the first and single most important one is the eradication of poverty. This is closely related to the second task, namely, the developmental role of social policy. The third challenge is how to create such social policy in a democratic and participatory way at both the national and micro levels and the final one is how to respond to the exigencies of globalization without undermining the intrinsic values of social objectives of equity and well-being.

This brings me to the issue of research. Research on social policy lags behind that on economic policy and political transformation (governance and democratization). Much of it remains highly descriptive and lacks the conceptual depth of the research on welfare regimes of Europe or the welfare developmental states of Asia. And yet, given the centrality of social policy to both development and democratization, there is a need to understand social policy both in its historical and political economy contexts.

An important determinant of the success of social policies is the recognition of sectoral affinities or complementarities between institutions located in different spheres of the political economy. In such situations, the structure and directions of movements in one sector complement those in the others. One striking point about Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper policy and much of the new discourse on social policy is that it draws very little from the history of the late industralizers of northern Europe or the East Asian developmental states which have achieved remarkable success in reducing poverty, and even less from the earlier African attempts that were zealously dismantled in the name of reform. This is a point that has been raised by Japanese scholars. This, I believe, is a point to which the Nordic countries should add their voice through both politics and research.

This has important implications for research. One such implication is that there is an urgent need to bridge the gap between area studies and other more specialized areas and a need to somehow relate the literature preoccupied with development, that concerned with democratisation and the consolidation of democracy and that with concerns of social inclusion and equity.

In its early years, development studies attracted some of the leading figures in the various fields of social sciences. Since then, in many universities, the study of development has been relegated to specialized institutes of development or area studies. While this may signal the recognition of the specificities of the problems of development or certain geographical areas, development studies has, in a way, lost some of its intellectual moorings by being excessively driven by the development aid establishment. One consequence is that valuable lessons from experiences of developed countries have little resonance in developing countries, and vice versa. A linear theory of development has neglected the study of the histories of the industrialized countries, presumably on the grounds that analytical tools useful to them are not relevant for the developing countries. But I feel strongly that there are many areas in which the study of these different societies can be mutually rewarding.

With respect to social policy, there is a rich conceptual and theoretical corpus of work on developed welfare regimes that is only now beginning to filter into the world of development studies. One explanation for this is the belief that somehow the welfare state is an endpoint of the development process. However, research at UNRISD clearly suggests that social policy is not something to engage in only after reaching a certain development threshold; nor is it an exclusive domain of advanced welfare states: social policy is a key instrument for economic and social development. Not surprisingly late industrialisers have tended to adopt certain welfare measures at much earlier phases in their development than the pioneers.

It seems to me morally imperative that more researchers be involved in addressing the serious problems of poverty and global inequality. This does not simply mean studying poor countries but also the histories and dynamics of the interlinkages between the rich and poor countries and how they impinge on their social and economic policies to address the issue of poverty.

Selected reading
Adésínà, ’Jìmí O. (ed.), In Search of Inclusive Development: Social Policy in Sub-Sahara African Context, UNRISD and Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

Bangura, Yusuf (ed.), Democracy and Social Policy, UNRISD and Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
Kangas, Olli and Joakim Palme (eds), Social Policy and economic development in the Nordic countries. London: Palgrave, 2005.

Mkandawire, Thandika (ed.), Social Policy in Development Context. London: Palgrave/UNRISD, 2005.
Razavi, Shahra and Shireen Hassim (eds),Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of “the Social”. UNRISD and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Riesco, Manuel (ed.), Latin America: A New Developmental Welfare State Model in the Making, UNRISD and Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2006.