I examine whether the African elite and middle classes have distinctive social attitudes, relative to poorer or lower class African people, and whether this has changed over the 2000s, in order to understand better how the rapid growth of the African middle classes affects social and political life in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter uses survey data (from the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s South African Reconciliation Barometer) to show that the African middle classes assess much more positively than the poor the economic changes that have taken place in post-apartheid South Africa, and that this differential has grown over time. The middle classes are aware of their privilege, but seem to underestimate the challenges facing the poor. They are also more positive about improved inter-racial relations since 1994, perhaps because they enjoy very much more inter-racial interaction than do the poor. In terms of public policy, the middle classes support more strongly affirmative action, but are also more likely to say that the government does too much for people and probably see less need for active policies around employment creation. Overall, the growth of the African middle classes seems to be good for race relations but reduces the likelihood of pro-poor policies to challenge inequalities of class.

The recent expansion of budget-financed antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America reflects a shift away from the stratified, Bismarckian, social protection institutions which dominated social policy in the 20^th century. The inclusion of low income and informal groups through emerging social assistance institutions has been largely vertical, as opposed to horizontal, leading to parallel institutions supporting formal and informal groups. The paper discusses the main trends and considers the political sustainability of dual institutions in the region. 

About the presenter:

 Armando Barrientos is Professor and Research Director at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester in the UK. His research focuses on the linkages existing between welfare programmes and labour markets in developing countries, and on policies addressing poverty and population ageing. His most recent books are ‘Social Protection for the Poor and Poorest’ (2008, edited with D. Hulme, Palgrave); ‘Just Give Money to the Poor’ (2010, with J. Hanlon and D. Hulme, Kumarian Press); ‘Demographics, Employment and Old Age Security: Emerging Trends and Challenges in South Asia’ (2010, edited with Moneer Alam, MacMillan), and ‘Social Assistance in Developing Countries’ (2013, Cambridge University Press).

Flora Hajdu presents results from a recent research project on the effects on smallholders of the MFPP and AsgiSA agricultural development programmes in the Eastern Cape. The project resulted in two papers as well as a PhD thesis entitled “From Betterment to Bt maize: “Agricultural Development and the introduction of Genetically Modified Maize to South African Smallholders” by Klara Jacobson. This presentation will focus on a paper on poverty-related aspects, where we show that the poorer smallholders faced various difficulties in securing benefits from these programmes. The one-dimensional view of the programmes of ‘raising effectiveness’ in smallholder agriculture through raising yields is questioned. Furthermore, smallholders are shown to barely have noticed the insect resistance of the GM maize - instead other properties of the ‘new maize’, which could equally well be found in much cheaper hybrid or open pollinated varieties of maize, were important to the poor.

Flora will also talk briefly about her current plans to seek funding from Sweden for researching the potential of cash transfers in South Africa.

Prevalence of drug-resistant TB is increasing. Treatment regimens have to be taken, typically, for two years and have poor outcomes. Most second-line TB medicines have poor evidence to support their use and are associated with terrible side effects. In 2010, no new class of TB drug had been approved in several decades. Based on the historical examples of campaigns for HIV medicines in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the US, the Global TB Community Advisory Board, TAC and other organisations began campaigning for pre-regulatory approval access to an experimental drug called bedaquiline. I will discuss the complex scientific and ethical challenges brought to the fore by this campaign

This paper discusses a community-led fencing project in the Koup, an arid predominantly sheep farming district in the South African Karoo. It highlights the role of supportive government officials in sourcing funding and the importance of committed individuals in overcoming collective action problems amongst participating farmers. The project had a strong empowerment dimension in that fencing team leaders were drawn from the ranks of unemployed people in Laingsburg town and they were responsible for recruitment into the project and for the day to day management of the work. Comparative analysis of the socio-economic position of the fence workers with data from the 2011 population census for coloured people living in Laingsburg town suggests that the fence workers were relatively poor and that the project was appropriately targeted for a poverty alleviation programme. This was in part because workers were required to camp on farms for two weeks at a time, thereby resulting in the project automatically selecting for those most committed to earning additional income. The study revealed that the fencing workers identified themselves as general agricultural workers but had skills and experience from other sectors including construction and services. Urban-based agricultural work has existed in Laingsburg for at least three decades i.e. that it preceded the shift of workers off farms that took place across South Africa after 1990. The study sheds light this long-standing, but under-studied dimension of urban poverty and on the diverse strategies (including reliance on government grants) that people use to combat it in the Karoo

Welfare regimes in Anglophone Africa were in the final phase of colonial rule and the first phase of post-colonial rule characterised by an agrarian approach, focused on preserving or strengthening the peasantry. These later gave way to an approach focused on non-contributory transfers of cash (or food) to the deserving poor through social assistance, food aid and public employment programmes. Social insurance, focused on workers, played a marginal role. This paper first examines the distinctiveness of these welfare regimes in a comparative perspective, and then examines the politics of welfare-state-building through a series of country case-studies. The case of Mauritius reveals the obstacles to adopting social insurance. The case of Zambia reveals the obstacles to adopting social assistance. The cases of Zimbabwe and Malawi reveal how and why democratisation might matter.

This presentation examines the argument that the relationship between democracy and Islam, and between democracy and religion more broadly, is a contingent relationship. The contingency derives from variations in (a) the salience of religion as a basis of social cleavage relative to the salience of other bases of social cleavages (e.g. class, ethnicity, race, region, language), and (b) the multifaceted ways in which religion becomes institutionalized in politics and governance. These variations suggest four possible outcomes: (1) High institutionalization of religion, independent of social cleavage patterns, will endanger democracy. (2) High institutionalization combined with high social salience of religion at the expense of other sources of social cleavage will weaken the prospects of democracy. (3) Moderate institutionalization of religion combined with cross-cutting social ethnic, language and religious fractionalization will facilitate democracy. (4) Low institutionalization and low social salience of religion reinforced by cross-cutting social cleavages will strengthen democracy.

The most important practice through which marriages are constituted in many African communities in South Africa today is ilobolo, often translated as bridewealth. Meanwhile, marriage rates in such communities are sharply declining, and many locals view ilobolo as a key contributor to this collapse. Through intensive ethnographic research in a quasi-rural KwaZulu-Natal community, this article explores the puzzle of how ilobolo maintains its authority over marriage even as many today see it as preventing more marriages than it produces. Drawing on the concepts of legal consciousness scholarship, I argue that the contemporary practice of ilobolo often enacts multiple, even contradictory understandings of marriage. But rather than undermining support for ilobolo, these diverse meanings actually help shore up its support by providing multiple legitimating narratives of the practice suited to varying social positions in a context of ideological, legal, political, and economic change. In particular, I argue that orthodox "affinal" understandings framing ilobolo as a practice for bringing two extended families together in marriage are increasingly supplemented by less explicitly recognized "conjugal" understandings framing ilobolo as a practice that helps produce marriage as a dyadic, intimate, and even egalitarian union of two individuals.