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

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Date
2023-06Author
Hallink, Courtney
Lenhardt, Amanda
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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.