Removing barriers to accessing Child Grants
Progress in reducing exclusion from South Africa’s Child Support Grant
Highlights
Social grants for children represent South Africa’s most successful intervention for promoting equitable economic growth and inclusive human development. Early evaluations of the government’s social security system identified its ability to reduce poverty, build human capital and contribute to a broad range of employment and growth impacts. The most recent evaluations robustly document the system’s positive developmental impacts.
Studies of the Child Support Grant (CSG) provide ample evidence of its ability to tackle poverty and vulnerability, provide care and support to those affected by HIV and AIDS, promote developmental outcomes and reduce the risk behaviours that leave adolescents vulnerable to HIV infection. The Foster Child Grant (FCG) and the Care Dependency Grant (CDG) provide a higher level of financial support to children whose parents are absent or deceased and children who suffer from a severe disability. These children are some of the most vulnerable and, therefore, the most in need of social support. The CSG, FCG and CDG represent the main social assistance programmes for children and their families.
One of the main challenges for child-sensitive social protection is to ensure that South Africa’s most vulnerable children receive the grants for which they are eligible. This applies especially to infants and adolescents, two of the groups most often excluded. Early and continued receipt of the CSG and other grants increases the poverty-reducing and developmental effects of the grants. Removing the barriers to accessing child grants cannot only increase their coverage, but their effectiveness and positive impacts as well.
This study examines trends in take-up and exclusion of eligible caregivers and children from grant receipt. It focuses specifically on the CSG, given its scale and the fact that it is South Africa’s main poverty-targeted grant for children. The study also analyses which children are most prone to being incorrectly excluded from the grant, what drives exclusion of age- and income-eligible beneficiaries, and the reasons most often cited for not accessing the CSG. One important contribution of this study is the spatial analysis and mapping of CSG exclusion rates across the country. This is done at a high level of disaggregation – for all of the country’s municipalities and wards. Such fine-grained analysis of exclusion will help to inform the implementation of actions, whether by government or other actors, to remove access barriers and increase uptake of the grant. Finally, the study includes a review of government policies and outreach strategies which have contributed to expanding CSG coverage over the years, but can be improved further to reach those children who are still not accessing their entitlements to social assistance.
