analysis
Judith Streak
In principle all children in South Africa have a set of socio-economic rights that includes social security. The Bill of Rights and signed international treaties give children the right to social services, including social security, basic health and nutrition, basic housing and shelter, and basic education.
A recent study commissioned by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) shows that at least 59,3% of the country’s children younger than six and 59,2 % of children aged 17 and below are living below the poverty line. This translates into 3,8-million poor children younger than six and 10,5-million younger than 17. The same study reveals that as many as 30% of children are desperately poor in that they go to bed hungry.
The government’s child social security programmes are reaching only a small proportion of poor children. The two programmes through which delivery is concentrated the child-support grant (CSG) and the care-dependancy programme (CDP) had only 1317 745 child beneficiaries last month. This is only 12% of our estimate of the number of poor children. (The CSG pays R110 a month to children younger than six and the CDP R570 a month to children with severe disabilities).
The delivery burden for the right to social security falls on the government. The importance of monitoring the government’s performance is underscored by the fact that there is little prospect for the markets to help reduce child poverty through employment creation in the near future. So what obligation does the non-realisation of children’s right to social security put on the government?
For children without parental care the government is obliged to allocate sufficient resources and use them in a way that delivers services to ensure that the rights are met immediately. For children with parental care it is obliged to deliver progressively and subject to the availability of resources.
Provided sufficient resources are available and there is a need for spending more and/or more efficiently on the right to social security, the government must:
Set aside funds in budgets for programmes aimed at delivering on the child’s right to social security;
Retain programmes directed at realising the right to social security for children;
Use the resources allocated to child social-security programmes efficiently and effectively;
Ensure that outputs in child social-security programmes are accessible to all.
A recent study by the Children’s Budget Project at Idasa, which covered the period from 1998 to this year, found the government to be meeting the following obligations:
To increase the real value of total provincial budgets for delivering the CSG and CDP to children over time.
To reduce provincial inequity in capacity for spending on delivering the CSG over time.
To spend and not waste funds allocated to the CSG and CDP programmes.
To take steps to remove continued obstacles in the way of the progressive realisation of the child’s right to social security. The government has increased take-up rates of the CSG and CDP grants and is restructuring the system to remove discrimination to access.
To increase output from the CSG and CDP programmes.
However, the study says it is not clear whether the government is meeting its obligation to ensure that the poorest children benefit most from budget allocations to the CSG and CDP. And in light of the increase in availability of resources for spending on public services the government is failing to:
Meet its obligation to maintain the real value of the two social-security grants targeted at children in parental care; and
To meet its obligation not to discriminate against any particular category of children in budget inputs and outputs in child social-security programmes.
The study highlighted the discrimination evident in the CSG against children aged seven to 17 and that hardly any progress seems to have been made in ensuring that children in remote rural areas can access their right to social security.
It is estimated that an extension of the CSG to children aged seven to 17 would cost about R8,84-billion if there is a 100% take-up rate. This is a considerable amount relative to what is available in social security budgets for 2001/02 (43%). Extending the grant to children aged seven to 12 with a more realistic take-up rate of 50% is more affordable, at a cost of about R2,4-billion a year (12% of provincial social-security budgets).
Fulfilling its obligation to budget for child social security requires that the government maintains as a high priority the real value of child social-security benefits. It also requires that the government either extend the CSG to children above the age of six or provide a costing that shows why extension is unaffordable.
Judith Streak is a researcher for Idasa’s Children’s Budget Project