The City of Johannesburg has been presented with an innovative programme to address child poverty and early childhood development while at the same time regenerating local economies by enabling poor communities to earn money.
It builds on Minister of Education Naledi Pandor’s announcement that funds for the Child Nutrition Programme must from now on be used to buy food grown locally.
The council called for a plan to meet the needs of the 300 000-plus children of up to five years old living in the city. Many experience extreme poverty and neglect. The proposal comes from a developmental consortium of South African New Economics innovators, Wits academics and early childhood development experts.
The plan builds on the principle that cash transfer programmes can do more than simply deliver services from the centre to passive recipients. They can also build communities so that poor communities are seen less as clients than as agents of change.
The programme supports the government’s plan to build the capacity of early childhood development centres, where the effects of generations of neglect and extreme poverty can be mitigated. Many of these, as now, will be in people’s homes, suitably adapted, in the community.
To bring all children into effective early childhood centres would require an additional 8 000 trained practitioners in Johannesburg alone — creating 8 000 permanent jobs.
The R250-million budgeted for child feeding could make a real difference to poor people by providing a demand for locally grown food.
It is calculated it would enable cash to circulate three or four times within communities, generating a local economic stimulus of R1-billion a year. Currently, cash that comes into poor areas generally goes straight out again.
About R40-million in loans will be needed every year to build community gardens, small farms and backyard livestock keeping: it is already available through the Land Bank and other poverty alleviation funds.
So is money for the adaptation of premises for purposes like professional child care. What is lacking is the legal entity under which communities gain access to such funding.
The proposal is that managing trusts would be formed in each community, answerable to the city, for the effective use of funds. The city would make policy, oversee, monitor and facilitate the programme.
The idea is rooted in the constitutional provision that parents and the wider family are responsible for their children, and that the state should intervene only in extreme circumstances. The proposal challenges international models, which emphasise individuals proving entitlement through need. These models are widely challenged as being humiliating to beneficiaries, expensive in terms of bureaucratic resources and contrary to the understanding that communities are the only context for poverty alleviation.
In Britain, for example, there is an understanding that the social services model based on proof of poverty must be replaced. Decades of Thatcherism and its New Labour equivalents focused on the “targeting” of need as the path to the delivery of grants. “Targeting” became the pre-requisite for efficient poverty alleviation — as opposed to universal provision, which is considered inefficient.
The new thinking arises from the recognition that “targeted” pension policy, for instance, leaves most pensioners with too little to live on, while millions are spent on administering grants of various kinds.
Much is written every year about “targeted” entitlements for everyone from children to the disabled and unemployed; yet both administrators and supposed beneficiaries feel oppressed by the system.
In Glasgow, for instance, 70% of the population receives some grant to mitigate a need. Thinking is moving from targeting to universal grants. South Africa’s Basic Income Grant Coalition will take heart from this.
There are, of course, challenges in the concept and practice of creating or reviving communities as recipients of state funding. The model accepts that the real poverty is in the absence of local institutions and local management — which it seeks to build. Trusting very poor people with large sums of money is counter-cultural in the world today, and the skills of community entrepreneurs not widely valued or highly paid.
Perhaps, however, we are on the cusp of something really new in terms of government funding for poverty eradication.
Margaret Legum chairs the board of South African New Economics