The Child Allowance Webinar Series - South Africa’s Child Support Grant
The Child Allowance Webinar Series - South Africa’s Child Support Grant
On 14th August 2015, the Child Allowance Webinar Series will commence with a webinar dedicated to South Africa’s Child Support Grant. The webinar is supported by the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (the IPC-IG/UNDP) and UNICEF and hosted by socialprotection.org.
The purpose of the Child Allowance Webinar Series is to present a variety of child allowance experiences including that of South Africa and Uruguay. Each country will have a dedicated webinar.
Brenton Van Vrede (Acting Deputy Director General, Comprehensive Social Security, at the Department of Social Development, South Africa) will present on South Africa’s Child Support Grant.
Roxana Maurizio (Associate Research-Professor in Economics, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina) will discuss the presentation.
Alejandro Grinspun (Chief of Social Policy, UNICEF South Africa) will serve as the moderator.
The South African Child Support Grant (CSG) features among the world’s most comprehensive social protection programmes and has substantially contributed to a reduction of child poverty rates in South Africa over recent years. The CSG was established in 1998, first targeting only children aged 0-7. Afterwards the programme was progressively opened up to all children under 18 and today reaches over 11 million children from poor and vulnerable families. The webinar will provide first-hand insights on the programme and will discuss several aspects related to the CSG’s design and implementation. In particular the following aspects will be discussed:
The rationale for the age-based roll out of the Child Support Grant
The South African experience with an unconditional child grant
The institutional framework on which the programme is built
The costs and financing of the programme
The CSG’s impact on child poverty and deprivations in the fields of education, health, and nutrition
Future plans for an expansion of the programme.
The video for the first webinar can be found in the following link:
