This study reviews existing knowledge on social protection experiences and lessons in southern Africa, concentrating on policies and instruments currently implemented in the six RHVP focus countries: Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Social protection includes but is not limited to safety nets, and describes all initiatives that provide income (cash) and/or consumption (food) transfers to the poor, protect the vulnerable against livelihood risks, and enhance the social status and rights of socially excluded and marginalised people. In practice social protection remains focused on the first and second of these objectives, covering similar ground to narrowly defined safety nets.

Social protection is a relatively new concept in southern Africa, and welfarist safety net programmes and interventions to save lives following livelihood shocks dominate policy responses to risk and vulnerability. The ideal of social protection as guaranteed, predictable transfers to all chronically vulnerable groups remains a distant ambition, although there are significant movements in this direction in several southern African countries.

Apart from formal social security arrangements for workers, three categories of safety nets for the rural poor are found in all six RHVP countries. These are: social assistance to people who are unable to work, emergency relief to people affected by livelihood shocks, and food security support to subsistence-oriented farmers. Since the 2001/02 food crisis considerable effort has gone into improving vulnerability analysis, installing more effective safety nets against humanitarian disasters, and systematising social protection against chronic vulnerability.

A number of policies and strategies that address social protection are common to almost every country in the region. These include poverty reduction strategies, national development plans and food security policies. A characteristic feature of these strategies and policies is problems with implementation or delivery.

Donors play a dominant role in financing social protection programmes in southern Africa, and international NGOs play a significant role in delivering these programmes, and in implementing their own projects. Most African governments do implement some social welfare measures, though these are limited and under funded. Local civil society also plays a role, often more prominently in the area of advocacy and rights than in service delivery or resource transfers.

Lesotho has no social protection strategy. Instead a number of policies and programmes address specific dimensions of vulnerability and provide support to particular vulnerable groups. The country remains chronically food aid dependent.

Social protection policy in Malawi has been characterised by diversity and lack of continuity. A wider range of interventions has been tried in Malawi than in any other country in southern Africa, but these remain projects rather than being institutionalised and are often abandoned after a few years.

Mozambique has a wide range of projects and programmes providing social protection to different groups of vulnerable citizens, but these measures do not add up to a comprehensive social protection strategy.

Swaziland has a number of policies and strategies that incorporate social protection elements, though none of them explicitly aims to co-ordinate these interventions under a single conceptual or policy framework.

Zambia is currently formulating a National Social Protection Strategy – the first in the southern Africa region. This should have the effect of bringing together a wide range of small scale initiatives, many of which are designed, funded and implemented by international donors and local NGOs, to address specific social assistance needs of sections of the Zambian population. Zimbabwe has an extensive range of formal social protection measures, many of which were in place before the recent macro-economic and political crises, others being introduced in response to recent sharp rises in vulnerability.

Despite these interventions many sources of vulnerability and many categories of vulnerable people are inadequately covered by existing social protection arrangements. Among these gaps, two intervention areas are especially important in terms of their impacts and the numbers of people affected. On the supply side, food production needs to be promoted at household and national levels, partly by facilitating access to agricultural inputs. On the demand side, market dependent food consumers need to be protected against excessive food price fluctuations, especially during the annual hungry season or pre-harvest months.

Challenges include shifting from emergency response mode to predictable risk management; scaling up, institutionalisation and co-ordination of existing programmes and projects; recognising that ‘affordability’ and ‘sustainability’ are political as much as fiscal; and addressing market failures as a solution beyond social transfers.

Learning opportunities include the need to assess alternative approaches to enhancing access to agricultural inputs; considering innovative approaches to food price stabilisation; consolidating and drawing the lessons from recent regional experiences with unconditional cash transfers; drawing lessons from both failures in the region (for example, price subsidies and price controls) and international successes (including labour market interventions in India, conditional cash transfers in Latin America and asset transfers in Bangladesh).