Social Protection in Southern Africa by Leila Patel

Author:Leila Patel [Patel, Leila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415727259
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18180759
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

5.4 Child well-being

We now turn to the question of child well-being. On the basis of CSG recipient perceptions, we considered four outcome indicators: food security, health status and immunisation, school attendance and pass rates, and family cohesion. These outcomes were not verified against administrative records or height-for-age measures of children to confirm their validity. However, the findings do provide an indication of how the caregivers perceived the well-being of the children in their care.

We used a validated Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (Coates et al., 2006) to measure household food security of respondent households. More than half (54%) of all CSG households said their households experienced severe food insecurity and a further 25% were moderately food insecure. This is despite the fact that 52% of women always spent the CSG on food. Therefore, without the CSG food insecurity would be more pronounced. The positive nutritional effects of the CSG were confirmed by Agüero et al. (2006), who found gains in child height-for-age. With respect to child health, 97% of CSG recipients said their children had been immunised, and the majority (92%) considered their children to be in good health.

All CSG children (100%) of school-going age were reported to be attending school regularly. Seventy-four per cent of school-going CSG children had not failed a grade. This was also confirmed by another study that concluded that children who received a grant were significantly more likely to be enrolled in school in the years following award of the grant (Case et al., 2005).

South Africa’s history of migrant labour damaged family cohesion, resulting in large numbers of children being cared for apart from their biological parents (Lund, 2008; Hall & Wright, 2011). Acknowledging this, it was decided to make the grant payable to the ‘primary caregiver’ of the child, possibly in the extended family, but also by people outside the family. The policymakers also took account of the fact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic might worsen the situation. We were therefore interested in who cares for children and in their care arrangements. We found that all the CSG children in the sample were cared for within the family, living in households with relatives (made up of two or three generations), and 87% lived with either one or both biological parents, as Figure 3 shows. However, the dominance of women as primary caregivers and their consequent care burden is again revealed when Figure 3 is examined, as it shows that 54% of the children in the sample lived with their mother only, while a small percentage (1%) of children lived with their biological father only. Sixty-two per cent of the CSG recipients said that the grant ‘helped to keep their family together’.

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