Social policy in South Africa: Navigating the route to social development

Abstract

This paper reflects on the trajectory of social policy in South Africa (1994-2017) and on which policy levers present opportunities for crosscountry policy transfer, in order to address current social development challenges. The current direction of social policy is described as the result of a compromise between two distinct alternative paradigms whereby the statist transformative and market-oriented residual paradigms are held in tension. On the one hand, a transformative policy perspective draws on human rights and views redistribution as a necessary premise for and means of economic growth. On the other hand in the residual framework, redistribution is envisaged as a secondary function that is dependent on economic growth. Several instances are outlined in which this tension is evident, together with the implications for social policy across the policy cycle: in legislation; in social compact formation; in the selection of social programmes and in their implementation; in gender-mainstreaming and in the engagement of the private sector in social policy. Overall we highlight areas of hybrid policy overlap between these bifurcated ideological, political and institutional frameworks, for example around social transfers and corporate social investment. We also describe instances of conflicting and at times unexpected outcomes, such as the National Health Insurance. Several factors are concluded to be of relevance to the Global South more generally: the importance of constitutionally-legislated rights as a basis for advancing socioeconomic claims; the emergence of new social compacts in contexts where there are significant levels of informal employment and unemployment and lastly, the influence of fiscal and institutional capability factors in shaping the direction of social policy and its implementation.

STEM for Sustainable Skills for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Snapshot at Some TVET Colleges in South Africa

“…Similarly 68% of students agreed that lectures, assignments and work in the school workshop systematically related to placement periods. These results do not correspond very well with existing studies that most of the youth in the country are unemployed and that schools and colleges are busy training students for jobs that do not exist [1,16].…”

“…This is contrary to [16] who states that educational systems have not kept pace with the changing nature of work, resulting in many employers saying they cannot find enough workers with the skills they need. Further, unemployment rate in South Africa increased to 27.7% in the first quarter of 2017 from 26.5% in the previous period [1]. From the findings in Table 2, students seem to be positive about equipment and materials in the training workshops.…”

“…However, the teacher complained that the content of the subject she was teaching was outdated because it was never revised since 1999. It is not surprising why employers cannot employ most students from colleges because of this mismatch of knowledge and skills [1] [16]. This mismatch was also confirmed by the teacher as follows:…”

“…At the third quarter of 2019, South African unemployment rate has increased to 29% as compared with 26.5% in the first quarter of 2017. Youth unemployment has been inordinately high for many years in South Africa and is one of the country's major socioeconomic challenges [1]. Cross-country comparisons regularly affirm that South Africa's unemployment rates are among the highest in the world.…”

Unintended Consequences of Community Health Worker Programs in South Africa

“…Efforts in South Africa to strengthen the health bureaucracy and redress racial health disparities are included in legislation for National Institutes of Health (NIH; Republic of South Africa, 2017). Currently in its pilot phase (Plagerson et al, 2019), the first step is to strengthen primary health care, described by the national Department of Health as primary health care reengineering (Republic of South Africa, 2017). CHWs are envisaged as playing a critical role in this policy reform (Schneider et al, 2015).…”