The child support grant system has inadvertently strengthened the societal expectation that women should bear the primary caregiving role for children — often without adequate support or compensation.
South Africa offers a range of social protection policies designed to support its citizens, including social assistance, unemployment insurance and public employment programmes.
These policies are rooted in a robust framework of human rights legislation, underpinned by what is widely regarded as one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.
Introduced at the end of apartheid, this framework was designed to dismantle the deeply entrenched inequalities created by apartheid-era legislation. As a result, South Africa’s Constitution and social policies incorporate several pro-poor and gender-sensitive design innovations.
However, despite these advances, certain constituencies (women) are called upon to bear the bulk of the care work, and others fall through the cracks. Among them are low-income black mothers.
Child support grant
South Africa’s child support grant (CSG) is an example of an effective social policy that targets the poor and is designed to contribute to social and economic equality. Introduced in 1998, the CSG is a publicly funded, means-tested monthly cash transfer granted to a child’s primary caregiver, who may be male or female and is defined as the person primarily responsible for meeting the child’s daily needs.
Most CSG recipients are women, with almost 90% of recipients being the biological mothers of children.
In a landscape often criticised for inefficient social services, the CSG stands out as a successful policy instrument. Its reach has grown significantly, reaching over 13 million children aged up to 17 in 2023. Although uptake has waned in recent years, the CSG remains the largest programme for alleviating child poverty in South Africa. In many households, the grant is an essential lifeline.
Looking a bit deeper, however, there are some significant issues with the CSG.
Although the CSG is designed to support the primary caregivers of children and make their lives easier, mothers who receive the grant have highlighted that it can actually have the opposite effect, adding to their burden of care work.
For low-income mothers, simply accessing Sassa offices can be a costly and exhausting ordeal. They must often travel long distances at great expense, risking their time, money and personal safety.
On arrival, they face a host of institutional barriers: difficulties accessing documents, staff shortages, rotating application days, system failures caused by load shedding and a lack of childcare facilities.
Compounding this is the disconnect between government services, forcing caregivers to move between multiple service points — healthcare, education, housing, social development and labour — to piece together the support they need. This unfolds in the context of poor infrastructure, unreliable roads and housing and inadequate basic services like water, electricity, transportation and internet access.
Once a mother does manage to access the grant, they are tasked with managing these funds, which often fall short of meeting families’ basic needs. In 2024, the child support grant amounted to only R530 per month — significantly below the poverty line of R760 per person set in 2023.
Mothers must stretch these funds not just to support their children but often their entire families, frequently at the expense of their own basic needs, for example, mothers often go hungry so that there is food for their children.
This additional labour is on top of their everyday care responsibilities, demanding significant emotional, cognitive and physical effort.
The result is an ever-deepening load of unpaid care work, which in a context of exceptionally high unemployment, further limits mothers’ opportunities to search for jobs, earn income or engage in activities that could improve their economic security, safety and wellbeing.
Considering that the vast majority of CSG recipients are low-income black mothers, it is them who must bear this cost.
A collaborative research team at UCT led by Professor Ameeta Jaga in Organisational Psychology has described this multilayered care burden, calling it The Motherload. It refers to the highly gendered, mostly invisible and undervalued work performed by those who undertake mothering, which hinders their economic security, safety and wellbeing.
The term “The Motherload” emerged through a participatory research process involving low-income black mothers as co-researchers — the group that bears the greatest responsibility for care work in South Africa.
Their stories reveal how policies like the CSG are actually experienced by those on the receiving end, exposing the frequent disconnect between policy design and lived realities.
The Motherload Project is carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada and is funded by the Government of Canada. It scales a pilot project funded by the UCT Grand Challenges Grant.
The research team includes a multisectoral group of academics in partnership with civil society organisations, including Flourish and SoHk. The collective has also partnered with Western Cape government departments who are invested in designing more people-centred policy – policy that serves the everyday needs of the poor.
Where are the gaps? Design and implementation
Policies do not succeed or fail on their own merits. In South Africa, it’s widely understood that limited social transformation often stems from implementation inefficiencies.
Grant recipients bear the brunt of these shortcomings, investing extra time, effort and money to navigate gaps left by poor government administration and under-resourced public services. This burden, many analysts argue, is a key reason behind the declining uptake of the child support grant.
However, the issue also stems from policy design. Sometimes referred to as policy “framing”, policy design involves formulating an issue and locating it in a certain framework. Where relevant, embedding gender into the design – or framing – of a social welfare policy is an important step in protecting against the policy inadvertently reproducing unequal social and economic outcomes for men and women.
When the CSG was designed, gender-neutrality was a central part of its framework. This allowed both men and women to qualify as a child’s primary caregiver.
The fact that the vast majority who receive the grant are mothers reflects pre-existing societal norms around caregiving. Rather than contribute to the undoing of these norms, critics have argued that the grant increasingly reinforces traditional divisions of labour.
Male caregivers, for example, have reported difficulties accessing the grant due to assumptions by officials and men themselves that caregiving is a woman’s responsibility.
Although the CSG was not originally intended to address household gender dynamics, it has inadvertently strengthened the societal expectation that women should bear the primary caregiving role for children — often without adequate support or compensation.
While gender neutrality might seem like the best approach, it is difficult to uphold in the face of deeply entrenched gender norms.
Ways forward: Centring ‘care’ and mothers’ voices
Preliminary findings of The Motherload Project demonstrate that mothers are aware of the systemic barriers they face and have long been imagining how resources and services could better meet their needs.
Their expertise should inform an analysis of how policies like the CSG either entrench existing inequalities or foster gender equity in economic and social realms. These insights should also guide policy implementation, ensuring services are coordinated around the specific needs of mothers.
Generally, policy-making in South Africa follows a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Policies are based on big data, which relies on numbers and quantitative methods to imagine an “average” South African experience.
However, in a country as deeply unequal as South Africa — with significant disparities between rich and poor — this “median” experience is rare. The Western Cape government has acknowledged this challenge and recognised the urgent need to approach policy design differently, paying attention to lived reality.
Collecting lived-experience qualitative data in participatory ways can be time-consuming and expensive. However, it is not necessary to gather “lived realities” for all demographics equally. The focus should be on the experiences of poorer, more marginalised populations.
In a country with many needy constituencies, it is difficult to justify prioritising one group’s voice over another. However, international experience has shown that explicitly centering care and caregivers in initiatives like city planning and addressing climate change can improve the quality of life for everyone — not just caregivers and their dependents.
One standout example is Bogotá’s “Care Blocks”, an innovative urban model that clusters essential services for unpaid caregivers and their dependents within a 30-minute walking radius. These hubs offer transport, skilling, income-generation opportunities, psychosocial programmes, healthcare services, mental health services, childcare and access to citizen services — all in one accessible location.
By organising infrastructure around the needs of caregivers, Bogotá is not only supporting care work, but also reimagining urban design to enhance community wellbeing.
Ways forward: A care-centred lens means a more integrated approach
Latin American examples like Bogotá have demonstrated that adding a “care-centred” lens to social policies broadens the scope of the policy and increases the sectors involved. It typically encompasses various areas, including health, education and labour.
It also supports access to infrastructure critical to caregiving, such as transport, food, clean water, sanitation and electricity. This approach necessitates a complex network of interactions among stakeholders, including governments, the private sector and civil society.
South Africa’s unique socio-political and economic landscape must inform a similar shift. Policies like the child support grant have significant redistributive potential, but this is often limited by poor linkages to complementary strategies.
In a country grappling with deep inequality, this represents a major missed opportunity.
So, where could the connections be made? Direct cash transfers like the CSG could be integrated with complementary social welfare services, streamlining access to education, healthcare, transport and poverty reduction programmes. These could include existing initiatives addressing water, sanitation, electricity, food security and internet access, along with practical support such as free school uniforms, school nutrition programmes and childcare services.
South Africa’s established networks of social security access points are well-positioned to serve as hubs for these interconnected services.
The benefits of a comprehensive, holistic social welfare package would be profound.
First, the effectiveness of the CSG would be amplified, ensuring that funds directly improve children’s life outcomes rather than compensating for inadequate social infrastructure.
Second, these services would reduce the unpaid care burden, predominantly borne by women, freeing up time and energy for education, work, or personal wellbeing.
Care work is already on the policy agenda, but meaningful progress requires more resourcing, the active involvement of intended beneficiaries in policy design and implementation and a concerted effort to coordinate state and civil resources.
By optimising what is already available and fostering collaboration across sectors, South Africa can begin to alleviate the disproportionate burden carried by low-income mothers who bear the heaviest care workload.
In doing so, it can reduce systemic inequalities and move toward a more inclusive and equitable society.
With the right commitment from local government and stakeholders, this could lay the groundwork for sustainable, transformative change. DM
Jess Capstick-Dale holds master’s degrees in Comparative Literature (University of Bologna) and Women’s and Gender Studies (Utrecht University). She is a researcher for The Motherload Project at UCT and is pursuing a PhD.
Prof Ameeta Jaga is Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Cape Town, where she also serves as Deputy Dean for Transformation and Inclusion. She leads The Motherload Project, and her work focuses on work-family dynamics and social justice.