The rise of the social protection agenda in Zambia over the past few years seems in some ways to fit with mainstream accounts of how welfare states are likely to emerge in developing countries, particularly in terms of the links to elections and pro-poor political parties. However, we...

In 2015 the Government of Uganda agreed to start rolling out a social pension programme across the country and to increase its own financial contribution to this. This outcome was largely driven by the decade-long and highly politicised efforts of a transnational policy coalition, led by mainly...

The growing literature on social protection in Africa has tended to focus on conceptual debates, policy design issues and impact evaluations. To date, there has been relatively little systematic analysis of the ways in which politics and political economy shape policy. This paper outlines a...

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. It identifies two main ‘models' of social protection in the region: the Southern Africa and Middle Africa models. It then assesses the contrasting policy processes behind these models and...

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. It identifies two main “models” of social protection in the region: one based on age-based income transfers in the middle income countries in Southern Africa, and another more diverse and...

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...