Workshop on Social Protection in Africa

Thirty scholars from all over South Africa, as well as Zambia, Uganda and Tanzania, gathered in the CSSR on 29/30 May for a two-day workshop on Social Protection in Africa.

Leila Patel (former Director-General in the South African Department of Welfare, and now Professor at the University of Johannesburg) gave a talk reflecting on "development social welfare", which she championed in the 1990s. Sarah Brooks (Professor at Ohio State University in the USA) presented her preliminary quantitative analysis of  cross-national data on conditional and unconditional cash transfers, explaining why some countries adopted the former and others the latter.

A series of panels focused on the implementation and local politics of social grants in South Africa, theoretical issues around grants, justice and distribution, the early history of social grants in South Africa between the 1920s and 1950s, the politics of policy reform in Uganda and Tanzania, and the politics of reform in Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe. The workshop programme is attached here.