Question

What are the major social groups which are vulnerable to poverty?

Answer 1

It is often women who require social protection interventions, as they are disproportionately vulnerable due to lack of capital, high wage differentials and gendered work norms, bearing the responsibility for childcare, and exclusion from basic services. Social assistance programmes, particularly conditional cash transfers, are often aimed at women as the recipient of the transfer and manager of the funds – 94 per cent of Bolsa Família recipients are women (Holmes & Jones, 2010: 1). In Sub-Saharan Africa, where unconditional programmes are more common, it is much less common to specify a female recipient (Garcia & Moore, 2012: 218). Programmes have positively impacted women and children’s health, girls’ education, and women’s knowledge levels and empowerment within the household and community.

However, gender is rarely used as an analytical lens to assess programmes (Ganju Thakur et al., 2009). Newer analysis shows that programmes relying on female beneficiaries tend to reinforce and draw on ‘traditional’ values which assume women’s altruistic roles towards children and families. This only empowers women as mothers and carers, not as individuals (Molyneux, 2008). Beneficiary women cannot always increase their control over household income, and conditions may only increase their domestic workload and time burden (Holmes & Jones, 2013: 70).