Browsing by Author "Trafford, Zara Katya"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Invisibility, informality and impropriety: multi-stakeholder perspectives on the implementation and administration of south africa’s care dependency grant for children with disabilities
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-08) Trafford, Zara Katya; Swartz, Leslie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Psychology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The key state-subsidised intervention for the social protection of disabled children in South Africa is the care dependency grant (CDG). Despite its importance to these children and their families, however, the CDG is profoundly under-researched. The CDG is an unconditional cash transfer, available to the primary caregiver of a child who requires full-time care due to their disability. To be eligible, caregivers must have an income below a certain threshold, and their child must undergo assessment by a doctor to gauge the child’s need for care. The CDG is legislated by the national Department of Social Development (DSD) and all grants are managed and distributed by officials at the DSD’s implementation agency, the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA). Additional role-players include social workers, civil society organisations, activists and academics who support and advocate for disabled children and their families. This study aimed to expand the extremely limited evidence base on the CDG by interviewing the abovementioned stakeholders. This dissertation is presented in three parts. Part One includes the study background, a critical literature review and the methods used. Other chapters in Part One assess the translation of international guidelines into local policy and implementation, the importance of context in the design of interventions for disability-related support, and the history of legislation on the CDG. Part Two presents three published articles, which focused on the CDG’s central stakeholders: SASSA officials, assessing doctors and caregivers. These chapters compare how different stakeholders understood CDG eligibility guidelines, application processes, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and related issues, revealing both overlapping and diverging perspectives. Key areas of discussion in these chapters include the measurement of disability and the role of ‘severity’, the role of subjectivity and objectivity in the administration of public benefits, and the (in)sufficiency of income support as a standalone social protection intervention. Part Three contains two chapters that synthesise findings from the desk-based and empirical research conducted for this study and ask more philosophical questions of the data. The first of these final two chapters explores the idea of ‘constructive informality’ in the local implementation of national policy on the CDG. It argues that while the negative dimensions of informality have historically been considered a threat to efficient bureaucracies, ‘constructive informality’ may actually contribute to the achievement of important policy goals. The second of these final two chapters contends that disabled children and their families experience a particularly intense and multi-layered ‘invisibility’ in South Africa, and that the systemic neglect of disabled children is rooted in the discomfort non-disabled adults feel when they ‘gaze upon’ these children. The chapter ends with caregiver’s narratives about their children’s personalities and their own hopes for the future, giving these parents the last word in a study primarily concerned with these families’ wellbeing. Those of us working in this area should commit to observing, documenting and communicating more nuanced stories about disabled children, while continuing to advocate for more material support for these children and their families.