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SECTION 1 2 3
WHAT CAN BE DONE
CASE STUDY
ZAMBIA: THE POWER OF PENSIONS
Tiziwenji Tembo is 75, and lives in the Katete district of Zambia.
Eleven of her 15 children are dead, and she now cares for four
grandchildren. Until recently, she had no regular income and she and
her grandchildren often went without food. Her children often refused
to go to school because they did not have uniforms and books, and
their fellow students would laugh at them. Their lives were transformed,
however, when she began to receive a regular pension worth $12 per
month, which has enabled her family to eat more regularly, buy
school uniforms and repair their house. 470
“
The true measure of any
society can be found in
how it treats its most
vulnerable members.
MAHATMA GANDHI
”
Social protection often involves governments providing money or in-kind
benefits – child benefits, old-age pensions and unemployment protection,
for instance – that, like healthcare and education, put ‘virtual income’ into
the pockets of those who need it most, mitigating an otherwise skewed income
distribution. It is not only central to reducing economic inequality, but also
to making society as a whole more caring and egalitarian, and less based
on individualism.
After the Second World War, the majority of wealthy nations introduced largescale,
often universal, social protection systems, that guaranteed a basic
income to all citizens and offered insurance against unemployment, old age
and disability, building a path ‘from cradle to grave’. In the USA, the introduction
of social security and pensions in the 1930s dramatically reduced levels
of poverty among the elderly.
The 2008 financial crisis prompted the establishment of the Social Protection
Floor Initiative, led by the ILO and WHO. The initiative encourages countries
to offer basic income security for the unemployed, all children, the elderly
and persons with disabilities or who are otherwise unable to earn a decent
living. However, recent figures show that more than 70 percent of the world’s
population is not adequately covered by social protection. 471
TOWARDS UNIVERSAL COVERAGE
Universal coverage has been the ambition in most wealthy countries, rather
than targeted benefits for the needy. This has often been for political reasons:
giving benefits to all increased a sense of national cohesion and solidarity;
it ensured the support of the middle classes and avoided the stigmatization
of means-testing.
Deciding who is deserving of benefits is a complex, ever-changing and often
divisive exercise, which has its own costs and can be subject to fraud. One
study shows that targeting is less efficient in low-income countries, owing
to high leakage, under-coverage and administrative costs. A staggering
25 percent of targeted programmes are found to be regressive and, in Africa,
targeted programmes transfer eight percent less revenue to the poor than
universal ones. 472 Moreover, targeted programmes are usually aimed at the
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