Almost half of South Africa’s 60 million people receive social grants, ranging from child support to pensions. The grants are intended to provide financial support to people living in poverty.
The largest components of South Africa’s social grants system were introduced or expanded to cover the entire population in the 1990s.Since then, the system evolved Joining one of the most comprehensive in the Global South.
In addition to direct economic benefits, subsidies have been shown to have a wide range of positive effects.These include the following improvements: child nutrition and educationincreased female labor force participation.
However, the effects of social subsidies on the health of older people have not been adequately investigated. until now.
Through a series of recent studies carried out as part of a large-scale research project in rural South Africa, it has been proven that social grants can help older South Africans protect their cognitive health and live longer. I did. Cognitive health is the ability to think, learn, and remember clearly.
We bring together our expertise in cognitive and population health to study the health impacts of three different cash transfer programs in a sample of 5,059 adults aged 40 and over living in rural Mpumalanga. did.
Thanks to these programs, our results have been consistently strong and positive.
Older people will make up a larger proportion of South Africa’s population over the next year 20 years. Our results provide good news about social intervention programs that countries are already implementing to promote health and well-being among older adults.
How did you conduct your research and what did you learn?
of Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System has collected data on more than 120,000 people in 31 villages in northeastern South Africa since 1992.
This rural campus of the University of the Witwatersrand was established to track and understand health and wellbeing in rural settings.
The Agincourt project is also a platform for other studies to gather more detailed information about specific community members.
We used data from an experiment cash transfer This is a trial within the larger Agincourt research platform that pays households monthly cash transfers from 2011 to 2015 and compares them to control households that receive no payments. Initially, just over 2,500 households enrolled in the trial. The monthly payment of R300 was split equally between the school-aged woman and her carer.
We also used data from Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study in South Africa. This is a small Agincourt cohort of 5,059 men and women aged 40 and older, with detailed information on memory function and dementia probability collected every three years from 2014/2015 to 2021/2022. It is.
We tested whether being in a group that received a cash transfer led to improved subsequent cognitive health up to seven years after the end of the trial.
People who received cash were found to be better off than those who did not. The most recent wave of the epidemic, 2021/2022, had slower age-related memory decline and lower odds of dementia. Data collection.
In some groups, an effect on mortality was also observed. For people who were relatively well off at baseline in terms of education and assets, the addition of cash benefits significantly reduced the risk of death.
In the second study, impact Elderly subsidies for men’s late-life cognitive health, i.e. part of the state pension.
From 2008 to 2010, the scope of subsidies for the elderly was expanded. age qualification For men aged 65 to 60. This meant that men aged 60 to 64 at the time of the expansion would be eligible for an additional one to five years of ‘top-up’ pension income before turning 65.
Women always had the following qualifications: 60 years Due to their older age, they were not included in this analysis.
We found that men who received their full five additional years of pension entitlement had significantly better cognitive function than would be expected if their subsidy eligibility had not been extended.
They also observed a “step-like” pattern in which cognitive function gradually improved with each additional year of pension eligibility.
In our final study, Child support subsidy Research on women’s cognitive health in later life.
When the child support subsidy was introduced in 1998, it was only available to children who were: Seven age. Since then, a series of policy changes expanded and eventually raised the age at which children were eligible for the subsidy. 18 Over time, this expansion means that two women with the same number of children could have access to vastly different amounts of child support subsidy income, depending on when their children were born. To do.
Consistent with our findings regarding subsidy expansion for older adults, higher access to child support subsidy income was associated with improved subsequent cognitive function among maternal subsidy recipients.
I’m looking forward to
Our results to date clearly demonstrate the benefits of South Africa’s social grants program for older people as currently constructed.
They suggest that as South Africa ages in the coming decades, continued investment in these programs will pay off in improved health and wellbeing for the country’s most vulnerable older people. There is.