Social assistance and dignity: South African women's experiences of the child support grant

Gemma Wright, David Neves, Phakama Ntshongwana and Michael Noble

Development Southern Africa, 2015, vol. 32, issue 4, 443-457

Abstract: Many women interact with the South African social security system in relation to the Child Support Grant (CSG), which is social assistance payable for children living with low-income caregivers. This paper explores women's accounts of how the CSG serves to protect and respect dignity, a foundational value in the South African Constitution. Drawing from focus groups and in-depth interviews with female CSG recipients of working age, it is argued that whilst the experience of using the CSG does protect dignity in certain important respects, other aspects including the application process, the small amount of the grant and negative discourses associated with the status of being a CSG recipient were experienced by many as erosive of dignity.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2015.1039711 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:deveza:v:32:y:2015:i:4:p:443-457

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDSA20

DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2015.1039711

Access Statistics for this article

Development Southern Africa is currently edited by Marie Kirsten

More articles in Development Southern Africa from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().