Lessons on South Africa’s Social Protection Response to Covid-19

Abstract

South Africa stands out for its social protection response to Covid-19, especially regarding the expansion of programmes, number of beneficiaries and benefit amount. At the height of the pandemic, the government introduced the emergency Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant was introduced for over 10 million unemployed adults and informal workers through a digitised system. Despite successes in expanding the grant system, digitisation of the system presented challenges and led to exclusion errors. An alternative to the country’s school feeding scheme, the National School Nutrition Programme which regularly fed around 10 million children, could not be found.