South Africa’s Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan was launched in October 2020 by the Presidency in response to the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides the Presidential Employment Stimulus program, it included emergency social protection measures, among which the introduction of a special Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress grant (SRD), providing ZAR350 per month for unemployed people not covered by any other form of support. The South African government now seeks to develop options for the future of SRD grant.

Find out more about the Extension in South Africa

The objective of this research project is to produce motivated recommendations on how the SRD should be designed going forward into the longer term, in order to maximize the impact of the grant on employment outcomes and to ensure it effectively reduces poverty, while maintaining its cost to an acceptable level:

1. To maximise the impact of the grant on employment, the project needs to understand how to design and label the grant to encourage its use for job search.
2. To ensure the grant effectively reduces poverty, the project must figure out the most cost-effective way to target and assess the eligibility of recipients. Moreover, poverty reductions can be scaled up by determining measures that could encourage take up among the most disadvantaged. 

Once these goals have been achieved, and in order to inform public decision-making, these findings must be communicated to a number of stakeholders in government and civil society.

This project is part of a wider research program conducted with several South African research centres and in close collaboration with the South African Presidency. Four other research projects analysing the externalities of the Covid-19 stimulus policy are currently being developed as part of the first pillar of the Extension's activities in South Africa.

This research project uses the model generated to conduct the 2014/2015 fiscal incidence assessment and introduces updated data for 2019-2021. It simulates five scenarios around eligibility criteria, targeting mechanisms, value, disbursement model and conditionalities and computes the potential impact on poverty and employment outcomes.

You will find below the research paper related to this project: 

• Proposal for the extension, redesign and repurposing of the SRD for the goal of poverty reduction

It is worth noting that another paper has been published on the implications of the SRD grant, funded by AFD outside the Research Facility on Inequalities: Systemic exclusion from a South African social assistance transfer (February 2024)

Research has already shown that some population groups have been harder hit by Covid-19 than others and that the pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities in many areas, including health, education, work, and gender.

In this context, inequality has become a central issue for governments willing to fight the effects of the pandemic and to better prepare for future shocks. In April 2020, the Togolese government set up a cash transfer program called "Novissi", with the financial contribution of AFD, to support any eligible Togolese citizen who lost his or her income due to the adoption of the response measures against Covid-19. 

Studies using updated data and capturing the potential effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on income inequality and poverty in Togo are relatively scarce. This research project aims to fill the gap in academic literature by analyzing the impacts of Covid-19 on inequality in Togo, and evaluating the effects of the Togolese social policy « Novissi » on mitigating the impact of Covid-19 on inequality.

Using rich microeconomic data from a survey conducted by Togo's Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques et Démographiques (INSEED) aimed at analysing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the research team will estimate an econometric model based on the model developed by Dang and Nguyen (2021).

Due to methodological limitations and data availability constraints, this project did not lead to a publication. Further information is available upon request.

Despite several efforts to promote pro-poor growth, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. While the country's colonial history and apartheid are known to have contributed to this inequality level, the nature and dynamics of its impact on society are yet to be fully understood.

Literature suggests that better institutions and lower level of inequality improve subjective wellbeing. However, evidence that examine how the interaction between these two variables explain variation in wellbeing is relatively scarce. This study will thus contribute to a deeper understanding of inequalities in South Africa. 

This research project has two main objectives:

1. Explore how variations in governance (such as audit outcomes) across South Africa's district municipalities explain the variation in the well-being of individuals.
2. Investigate how the interaction between the variation in governance across local government municipalities and inequality among individuals explains variation in subjective well-being.

To investigate the interactions between the quality of institutions and of the governance, the level of spatial inequality and the subjective wellbeing, researchers will use the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), a nationally representative survey of individuals across South Africa, which is repeated over five waves between 2008 and 2017. They will also use audit outcomes of local municipalities to proxy for the quality of governance.

You will find below the research paper related to this project:

• Spatial Inequality, Sub-regional governance and Subjective Well-being - The case of South Africa

The economic upturn in Côte d'Ivoire since the 2010s has had a limited impact on employment. The transition to employment is often difficult: 35% of 16-35 year olds are far from the labour market (neither employees, nor educated or in training). Moreover, the share of informal employment remains very high (89.4% in 2019). In this context, as a result of population growth, 300,000 young graduates join the job market every year – and an equivalent number leave the education system without a diploma, and without prospects. The mismatch between skills and job offers would be one of the explanations for the difficulties of integrating young people into the labour market.

If these young people carry economic and social development opportunities, they also carry risks if their potential is not used. Population growth makes it imperative to understand changes in labour supply and demand in order to adapt the education and learning system to the needs of the local labour market.

This research project aims to analyze the supply and demand of skills in Bouaké, Daloa, San-Pedro and Korhogo, four secondary cities in Côte d'Ivoire with strong economic potential but that is still little exploited. The city of Abidjan, on which the majority of studies on Côte d'Ivoire focus, is not specifically addressed by this research, but it remains the "reference" case for the analysis of the situations of secondary cities.

Deepening the results of a previous research project on the mismatch between skills and jobs in Côte d'Ivoire, this research project aims to enrich national knowledge on the functioning of the labour market and the nature of bottlenecks that make the transition to employment difficult for young people, as well as to make recommendations aimed at promoting employment and the attractiveness of the four cities.

Additionally, the project includes capacity-building activities specifically targeting young CREMIDE researchers, to support them in the development of their research and to encourage the establishment of scientific partnerships through their participation in international conferences, workshops and training seminars, and through residence in specialized research centres. 

The study will include an in-depth examination of the structure and composition (demography, training and skills) of the local workforce, and of spatial inequalities in skills supply and demand. A gender-specific assessment of the local skills supply will also be carried out, as well as a prospective analysis of the impact of technological developments on the labour market in these cities.

The data used will come from both employment surveys available since 1993 and field surveys conducted during this project. The analysis will incorporate a prospective aspect aimed at understanding jobs in Côte d'Ivoire by 2025 and 2030.

Knowledge will be shared with the research community and made available to national and local decision-makers through workshops, conferences and publications in adapted formats to inform public decision-making.