As noted in this book’s introduction, southern Africa’s new programs of
social assistance have been a rare success story in the world of development
and poverty policy. A substantial body of solid research demonstrates
that programs of direct cash transfer (especially old age pensions
and child support grants) have had real and impressive positive effects.
In the midst of massive economic restructuring that has resulted in the
shedding of many of the low-�skilled jobs that once sustained poor and
working-�class communities across the region, social grants (in those
countries that have such systems) have been hugely important in enabling
children to be fed, retirees to be sustained in dignity in their old
age, and destitution to be reduced. In a region that has for de�cades been
littered with failed development and anti-�poverty schemes (cf. Ferguson
1990), the demonstrated successes of these new and expanded systems of