The Alliance for Children's Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS) is a national alliance of 170 child sector organisations. Alliance members share in a mission of ensuring that children's rights to survival and development are promoted and protected through the development of a comprehensive and effective social security system.

ACESS members come from every province and include NGOs, paralegals and advice offices, FBOs, academic institutions and CBOs .Our members daily assist children and we are all concerned by the problems caused by the fact that the social security system is not providing for the children that we serve. Our members work with streetchildren, orphans, children who have been abused, children with disabilities, children with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses, children who are suffering from malnutrition and hunger, children living without adults. All of us believe that poverty urgently needs to be addressed. We are all united in our call for a comprehensive social security system that prioritises children’s needs.

ACESS was established in March 2001 at a National Workshop. The workshop was held to provide an opportunity for organizations in the children's sector to discuss the social security needs of children and to make recommendations that would be fed into the Committee of Inquiry research process and government's social security policy reform process.

After workshopping the social security needs of children and making recommendations on how the current system needs to be reformed, workshop participants mandated ACESS to take the recommendations of the workshop forward into the various decision making processes. A number of submissions and presentations have been made to the Committee of Inquiry, the South African Law Commission, the Department of Social Development and Parliament, in fulfillment of this mandate.

We are pleased to be able to report that many of the recommendations for reform that came out of the children sector workshop have been incorporated into the Report of the Committee of Inquiry and the draft Children's Bill.

In June 2002, ACESS sent a submission on the Committee of Inquiry Report, to the Department of Social Development. This submission to the Portfolio Committee is a shortened version of that submission. In this submission to Parliament, we have chosen to focus on the recommendations made by the Committee of Inquiry that we feel need most attention at this moment. ACESS's detailed submission is available for those who would like to see our response to all the recommendations in the Report.

In this presentation, we will therefore focus on four areas:

1. Introduction of a Comprehensive Social Protection System that comprises a package of services, benefits and cash grants.
2. Extension of the Child Support Grant to all children under 18 as the first phase of a BIG for everyone
3. Introduction of a BIG for everyone
4. The improvement and extension of the Primary School Feeding Scheme to ECD centres, grade R and secondary schools

The poverty problem facing South Africa is very big. It requires an inter-sectoral, co-ordinated and comprehensive response from government, the private sector and everyone in society. The following table provides statistics showing how many children are living in poverty.

Source: Cassiem & Streak (2001: 20-23) & Streak (2002).

The third column gives the statistics for very poor children. It shows that there are 11 million very poor children living in South Africa. There are therefore many children living in poverty that need assistance.

What kind of assistance do they need? ACESS recently conducted participatory research with children across the country who are living in poverty. We asked them a number of questions and conducted various exercises to get them to tell us what kind of assistance they need. One of the questions that we asked them was "How can government help you?". This is what they said:

Children need a package of services, grants, programmes and benefits – they need a comprehensive system that provides for all their basic needs: Food, transport, school fees, school stationary, school uniforms, clothes, shelter, safety, health care, water and sanitation.

The Report recommends that everyone in South Africa should have access to a basic minimum income through the child support grant (0 to 17), Basic Income Grant (adults between 18 and 65) or old age pension (65 onwards).

Furthermore all people should have access to free or subsidized services such as primary and secondary education, lifeline water and electricity, transport, sanitation, primary health care, housing, and skills training.

People with special needs should be entitled to cash grants and services eg disability grants, foster child grants, free assistive devices and subsidized accessible transport.

The Report stresses that it is not desirable for a poor person to have to choose between basics. Due to the fact that the current safety net has large holes in it, poor people often do not receive any protection at all (eg unemployed adults) or are forced to use the little protection they receive (eg an old age pension) to pay for a basic service that should be free or subsidized (eg the grandchildren's school fees).

The reality of families having to choose between basics often results in the children going hungry or not being able to go to school. When competition for basics is high, children that are particularly vulnerable, such as orphaned children being cared for by extended family members, often bear the brunt of the scarcity of resources in the household.

The package approach will also enable people to use their income grants for food, self empowerment, development and work-generating activities as the cash grant will not have to be used to pay for basic services such as life-line water and electricity, education, sanitation, and basic health care.

The Report recommends that the new comprehensive system should be phased in over time. The Committee stresses that the first phase of the new system should prioritise the most vulnerable, namely children up to the age of 18 years. The Report recommends that this be achieved through the extension of the child support grant to all children under 18 years.

ACESS supports this recommendation and we would like to see immediate implementation. As we speak, many six year olds are about to turn seven and be removed from the system. In December they and their families will be faced with hunger. We can prevent this by immediately making a decision that no child that is on the system will be removed.

Over a period of 4 and a half years (April 1998 to October 2002) the CSG has only managed to reach 2, 1 million children. This represents 42% of the total 5.2 million poor children under 6 years (using IDASA’s figures quoted above).

Many administrative hurdles reduce the accessibility of the CSG for poor children. These include problems with accessing identity documentation from Home Affairs, complicated forms and procedures, complicated means testing, no money to pay for transport to go to town. This has resulted in poor uptake rates across the country, with worse accessibility in the poorer provinces and rural areas which is where the majority of poor children live.

A study undertaken in the impoverished Mt Frere district in the Eastern Cape (Sogaula et al 2002) provides a good example of limited access to the child grants, despite great need. They found that the Child Support Grant and the Foster Care Grant had very low uptake rates. Of 54 children who were eligible for the CSG, only 11 applications were made by care-givers, of which only four were successful, i.e only 7% (p37). Most of the non-successful applications were due to the care-givers being unable to obtain the correct documentation.

The National Department of Social Development has embarked (July 2002) on a massive public awareness and registration drive for the CSG and other grants, and this has increased the uptake rates over the last few months. ACESS is assisting with this campaign through media advocacy (using the various Soul City media vehicles to promote grants awareness), grants literacy material and member mobilisation.

However, awareness raising needs to be accompanied by the removal of administrative and service delivery barriers in order to have maximum impact. ACESS therefore recommends that a detailed plan needs to be drawn up to start removing the barriers in the short to medium term.(The Report did not address this need.)This plan needs to include mechanisms to allow for alternative forms of identification, active assistance for applicants with documentation problems, the removal of the means test, and the deployment of mobile units in rural areas.

One of our members, a health field researcher in Mt Frere, Eastern Cape, Nzwaki Sogaula concludes after a two year study of the links between malnutrition and poverty in the Mt Frere district:

"Extending the CSG to all children under 18 years and removing the means-test would, we suspect, make a very significant impact on poverty in the area. The removal of the means-test would have the effect of reducing the administrative burden and allowing existing resources to be deployed more effectively" (p.57).

The ANC and Cabinet have indicated that they support the proposal for the extension of the child support cut off age from 7 to age 14. While ACESS welcomes this proposal as a good first step we recommend a full extension to age 18.

Using SSA and IDASA’s estimates of child population and poverty rates in 2002, based on the OHS 1999, it may be calculated that:

• There are approximately 11.1 million children under 14yrs living in poverty (using an absolute poverty measure of R400 per capita)
• There are approximately 8.5 million children under 14yrs living in dire poverty (using an absolute poverty measure of R200 per capita)
• The extension of the CSG to children under 14 years of age will greatly ease dire poverty for these children and is welcomed by the Children’s Sector.

However, even if the Department of Social Development manages to reach all the poor children under 14yrs living in poverty, there will still be:

• 3 million 15 to18yr-olds living in poverty without any assistance, of which 2.5 million are living in dire poverty.
• 60% of the adult population who are living in poverty, will continue to receive no assistance.

The Report recommends the introduction of a basic income grant for everyone. ACESS supports this recommendation.

The whole social security net currently provided by the government fails to cover a large proportion of the population, that of unemployed adults. Due to the chronic structural unemployment in the country, these people are unlikely to find jobs. Thus, in a poor household of six people, the money being received for two children under 14 years, will feed the entire family, and thus the children’s specific needs are not met by the grant. However, if all members of the family received a basic income grant, the children’s basic needs are more likely to be met.

In our child participatory research, we asked children living in poverty across the country if a basic income grant would make a difference in their lives. This is what they said:

International evidence also shows a clear coloration between increased family income and child wellbeing.

If we want to improve children’s lives, we need to support families, especially young families and extended family structures. Providing everyone with a basic income grant will increase the total income in each household which will greatly improve children’s lives.

The following quotes are voices of children living in poverty. This is what some of them said about hunger:

In the section on the child support grant, the Report mentions that the CSG should be accompanied by food support programmes but it does not provide any detail on these programmes.

Food prices are rising due to inflation increases. Recent price hikes have again demonstrated the urgency of the situation. In the next few years, poor families will struggle to feed their children, even if the extension of the CSG becomes an effective reality.

The Integrated Nutrition Programme (INP) aims to provide a co-ordinated, intersectoral approach to nutritional deficiencies among women and children, through health facilities and community based nutritional promotion programmes, including the Primary School Nutrition Programme (PSNP). The quality and quantity of the food provided by the PSNP has been found to be below adequate, and corruption and misappropriation of funds has occurred. There has been no follow-up evaluation of the PSNP since the 1997 evaluation. However, despite problems with the schemes, research and discussions with children reveal that the snack provided at school is often their only daily meal.

1. The primary school feeding scheme must remain as an essential ingredient of the social protection package and be improved upon to ensure that children's nutritional needs are provided for.
2. Children in ECD centres, crèches, grade R and secondary schools should also be provided with nutritional support through state funded feeding schemes.
3. The Protein Energy Malnutrition Scheme that provides vulnerable mothers and babies in clinics and hospitals with nutritional support must be retained and improved upon.

Thank-you for the opportunity to make this submission and we wish Parliament well in its future deliberations on the social security policy reform process. This important policy reform process should involve as much consultation as possible and we therefore recommend that Parliament hold full public hearings on all aspects of the Report in 2003.

This short submission cannot provide input on all ACESS’s recommendations. Please refer to our detailed submission to the Department for input on other components of the comprehensive system.

For more information, please contact:

Paula Proudlock

ACESS Task Team Member

021 – 685 1583