The good life? Focusing a capability lens on Zambia's social cash transfer programme

The social cash transfer programme is Zambia’s largest social protection programme designed to reduce poverty and curtail intergenerational poverty transfer through the provision of a bi-monthly cash transfer. To do this, the unconditional cash transfer programme has five key objectives: supplement household income, contribute towards an increase in the number of children enrolled and attending primary school education, reduce mortality and morbidity among children under five years, increase households having a second meal daily and promote household food security and increase in the number of households owning assets such as livestock.

Using a capability lens, this thesis examines the bridge, or lack of, between the programme’s expectations and the lived realities of the recipients. It does this by investigating the values and rationalities of policymakers and recipients as manifest in their conceptions of well-being or poverty and its reduction. These conceptions are viewed in the capabilities highlighted in the objectives of the program on one end and the recipients’ capabilities viewed in the various things they manage to do with social cash transfers on the other end. In so doing, this research identifies how different policy actors perceive well-being and poverty reduction, viewed and understood through what they value and have reason to value: their ideas of the good life. Through the implementation process, the research then examines the interaction of some design and implementation features and their influence on the conversion of social cash transfers into capabilities (opportunities) and the choice of functionings (achievements).

This ethnographically inspired qualitative study uses interviews with social cash transfer policymakers at the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services Headquarters, including the Programme Implementation Unit (PIU), implementers at the district and community levels, as well as recipients of social cash transfers in two districts of Zambia. It also uses secondary data from policy guidelines, briefs and reports from the implementing organisation.

The study finds that the conception of poverty and its reduction and well-being by policymakers and social cash transfer programme recipients differ because of their diverse values and rationalities. Policymakers define poverty as incapacitation and vulnerability and operationalise its reduction and well-being into the five objectives, which focus on material well-being. The objectives are not consistent with the principles of the capability approach relating to being holistic or multi-dimensional. For social cash transfer recipients, poverty is defined in material, relational and subjective terms as portrayed in the diverse dimensions viewed in their use of cash transfers, therein their ideas of the good life. Therefore, there is a disconnect between the expectations of the programme and the lived realities of the recipients, which the implementation process attempts to balance.

The thesis finds that some features in the design and implementation of the program are not consistent with the capability approach because they exhibit forms of conditioning that do not recognise aspects of the capability approach. The design’s non-consideration of agency and freedom, including conversion factors, renders it paternalistic. Owing to the disconnect, the thesis proposes a capability-based social cash transfer programme that is holistic, human-centred, multi-dimensional and recognises factors in the social structure that affect the expansion of capabilities and the achievement of functionings.

This thesis has theoretical and practical relevance. It offers avenues for improvement in the design and implementation of social cash transfer programmes by increasing the information base in determining how well people are doing. It also contributes to the literature on the capability approach by considering how resources are converted into capabilities and functionings, and the freedom people have to determine their course of action. Therefore, it highlights the influence of some design features on the utilisation of social cash transfers. The research further contributes to scholarship on cash transfers and the capability approach by highlighting what different people value and have reason to value (ideas of the good life).