“It's not enough:” Local experiences of social grants, economic precarity, and health inequity in Mpumalanga, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
South Africa has received international recognition for taking an active role in addressing extreme poverty by establishing a national social grant program. Lauded as one example to alleviate poverty, the operating assumption is that these strategies provide alternatives to mainstream development assistance. Notwithstanding their potential effects, the pathways generating livelihood change and their long-term implications for processes of citizenship formation and state society relations remain unclear. Drawing from an interdisciplinary study of social and economic change in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, we analyze household surveys and qualitative interviews to examine how individuals manage their limited income through a balance of social grants, economic remittances, labor migration and strategic task-shifting. Though more than half of the households receive some form of pension support from the national government, many continue depending on remittances from household members living elsewhere. Social grants additionally interrelate with health maintenance in complicated ways, evidenced by high HIV rates within the study region. We argue that while the distribution of grants helps alleviate financial stress, the structure of assistance programs is more symbolically than materially significant for many families. Despite government assistance, families require social network mobilization and resources to access and secure healthcare and other basic needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".