EDITORIAL: AFRICAN GOVERNMENTS MUST SPEND MORE ON SOCIAL PROTECTION
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has expressed concerns over Africa’s low expenditure on social protection.
Indeed, there is every reason to be worried about this, as Africa’s social expenditure is less than half the global average of 13 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
The good thing is that ILO has come up with a strategy to support individual African countries to adopt universal social protection.
This could help countries in regions like East Africa to more than double social protection coverage to 40 percent come 2025.
ILO’s Country Director, Mr Wellington Chibebe, revealed this at a labour migration forum organised by the East African Community (EAC) recently. ILO pointed out that low social protection expenditure was partly due to high informality rate in the continent, currently at 83 percent.
Experts define social protection as “all public and private initiatives that provide income or consumption transfers to the poor; protect the vulnerable against livelihood risks, and enhance the social status and rights of the marginalised – with the overall objective of reducing economic and social risks”.
They also point out that social protection comprises various benefits provided to households – usually by public bodies – to help with their needs. Social protection benefits can either be in cash or in kind. Benefits in kind include the costs of hospital stays, free school meals and home-care.
In a nutshell: social protection is the basis for enjoyment of human rights and dignity – particularly through the reduction of poverty and inequality, as well as by promotion of inclusive growth via boosting human capital and productivity.
Africa should, therefore, strive to ensure that it increases expenditure on social protection to cover the entire human life-cycle, from birth to death.
Social protection schemes should, therefore, expand to include more people, both in the formal and informal sectors. The monies held should also be ring-fenced.
HONOUR KEY COURT’S DECISIONS
Zanzibar President Hussein Ali Mwinyi has called upon member states of the African Union to faithfully implement decisions of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). Dr Mwinyi’s call was conveyed to the participants of the International Conference on the Implementation and Impact of Decisions of the African Court in Dar es Salaam.
Among other things, the message stressed that implementing the African Court’s decisions in the letter and spirit would no doubt “show the world that African countries now seriously take the protection and promotion of human rights”.
Doing so would also contribute in large measure to success of the Court as a truly-effective African institution within the comity of nations. Indeed, the African Court President, Lady Justice Imani Aboud, expressed alarm that only seven percent of the African Court’s decisions “so far have been enforced…”
Considering that the court came into force on January 25, 2004, it means that a whopping 93 percent of its decisions – and, therefore, its raison d’etre, time, funding, energy and other resources – have been going to waste simply because the court’s members pooh-pooh its decisions. This must not go on, and Africa should heed Dr Mwinyi’s call to accept and implement the African Court’s decisions as a matter of course.
