EDITORIAL 
THIS SPECIAL EDITION of the Journal of Social Development in Africa 
contains papers that make up a four-nation contribution to understanding 
formal and informal social security arrangements in southern 
and eastern Africa, adding to the empirical and conceptual knowledge 
of the situation and making practical suggestions on the way forward. 
Local experts in the field of social security conducted the study in 2001 
in Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, with the aid of a grant from 
the International Research Development Centre, Ottawa, Canada, 
following a research proposal by Prof. Edwin Kaseke of the School 
of Social Work, Harare. 
The study was designed to address social security provision in both 
formal and non-formal sectors to discover the viability of existing 
social protection measures with a view to examining their nature, the 
contingencies covered and the benefits and coverage of the schemes. 
This is necessary in order to examine the potential for the strengthening 
of these schemes. 
It was done in two phases. The first phase was designed to map out 
existing social security schemes, the population covered, and to 
interview social security institutions, experts in this area, participants 
in both rural and urban areas and organizations supporting such 
schemes. The second phase involved an in-depth study of one or two 
of the most promising non-formal schemes that had been identified 
in the first phase, to assess the kind of help they offer and their viability, 
to suggest ways of strengthening them, if possible and to examine the 
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to each kind of social 
security provision. Uganda combined both phases in a single report. 
Methodology 
Careful guidelines provided by the research proposal was followed by 
all research teams. As a result and to save space-, the methodology 
exposition in individual papers has been truncated. For Phase I, the 
teams contacted relevant government ministries, departments and local 
authorities before the process of data collection. Sites were chosen 
throughout the country to represent a cross-section of the population
and the social security institutions in the country. Social security 
organizations, mutual aid groups and participants in such schemes were 
targeted as were non-governmental organizations who provided 
technical or financial support for some non-formal schemes. 
The study population compromised representatives of organizations 
dealing with social security issues; organizations supporting social 
security programmes; members of the groups studied, community 
leaders and experts in the area of social security. 
Multiple data gathering methods were utilized in order to obtain both 
quantitative and qualitative information. The researchers reviewed 
country-based literature and documentation on both formal and nonformal 
social security systems. They used structured interviews with 
interview schedules to obtain information from members of different 
groups and community leaders such as chiefs, councillors and headmen. 
Interview guides were used for representatives from formal social 
security organizations and social security experts. Information on 
mutual aid groups was obtained from community services officers 
(municipalities) and others. Focus group discussions with beneficiary 
populations were also used. 
The concept 
All four country reports indicate that the concept of formal social 
security inherited from the West is of little use in understanding social 
security provision in Africa. The ILO definition of formal social 
security relates to a provision funded by substantial and regular contributions 
of wage-earners and their employers. This group, however, 
forms a tiny minority of the whole population in African countries and 
formal social security provision cannot be extended to the poor majority, 
whose earnings are irregular and scanty. 
In pre-colonial Africa it was the family and, in some cases, the 
kinship group, that provided social security for its members. The 
reports describe in some detail how the reliability and economic 
security of these traditional safety-nets has declined in the last 120 
years. The Zambian team, in particular, shows how the advent of the 
colonial State since 1890 and industrialization and urbanization, in the
form of copper-mining, has contributed to the impoverishment of the 
rural base which formerly provided the extended family with its 
economic assets and thus its security base. Since that time other forces 
have precipitated the destruction of the extended family, including 
globalization and post-Independent policies. 
Formal social security provision 
Formal social security appears to be provided for only a tiny percentage 
of the citizens of these countries. The authors provide a wealth of 
useful detail as to the scope, rules and coverage of formal social 
security. State-provided social security in all four countries share 
woefully-similar tendencies: the promulgation of ill-thought-out 
policies, unfavourable investment policies, political interference, 
obstacles placed in the path of legitimate beneficiaries, a lack of 
transparency so beneficiaries have no idea what they might receive at 
the end of the day, and so on. Formal contributory social security has 
been difficult to "sell" to clients, it has been badly administered and 
employers appear to flout the law when it suits them. 
The authors have, nevertheless, attempted to show ways in which 
these schemes could be reformed to suit beneficiaries rather than, as 
one comments, a mere rearrangement of a State-owned monopoly. 
Non-formal social security provision 
As a result of the failure to provide overall coverage, new forms of nonformal 
social security have been generated, some by the State and 
some by communities and self-help groups; some by migrants and 
some on the model of pre-colonial systems. An example of the latter 
is the Zunde raMambo in Zimbabwe. The co-operative, sponsored by 
the Nyerere government, only to be destroyed, reinstated and 
reinstated again by succeeding Tanzanian governments, is an example 
of the first group. Also in Tanzania are savings and credit societies 
whose members, unlike the other non-formal schemes mentioned in 
these papers, are in waged employment and make regular contributions. 
Burial societies were initiated by migrants in urban areas but have 
spread to the local population and even to rural areas: they are
mentioned in the Zimbabwean and Zambian reports. Market associations, 
initially taken over by UNIP in Zambia for the purposes of 
political mobilization, have reverted to self-help for market members 
and some include help with funerals. Chilimba groups in Zambia 
operate as a form of interest-free mutual aid. Uganda shows how semiformal 
social security groups have become established at village and 
community level and adopted the structure of formal institutions to 
further their ends. These groups have gradually taken on some of the 
judicial, administrative and even political roles of local council. 
Many of these forms of self-help and mutual aid have come about 
as a spontaneous response to the howling poverty that is the lot of most 
people in this region. The papers help us to see not only how industrialization, 
urbanization, globalization and structural adjustment has 
affected the poor majority, but how people have seized upon instruments 
both traditional and contemporary as means of helping 
themselves and each other. 
Poverty 
The extreme and suffocating poverty which regulates the kind of help 
they can give each other, however, means that the resources they are 
trying to share and redistribute are pitifully small. Their poverty 
combines with a lack of skill that hampers the administration of these 
schemes. As a result they fall back on face-to-face associations based 
on kinship, community, occupational or friendship ties which foster a 
strong sense of mutual purpose and mutual trust. It is this small, faceto-
face group which will form the nucleus of the kinds of multiple 
informal social security arrangements of the future. 
Yet the authors return again and again to the bottom line: the 
poverty of the people. How can people who are not themselves in 
employment and who are therefore not part of the formal economy 
provide social protection to themselves? The Tanzanian team points 
out that when the co-operative movement was subsidized by the State 
and viewed as primarily social rather than economic in nature, it 
provided a social service to the entire community. If co-operatives were 
viewed in this light today they could revert to their former role in which
the strong support the weak. The Tanzanian team remarks that even 
under structural adjustment governments can provide systematic and 
long term protection to peasants' co-operatives when governments in 
Western Europe, North America and Asia protect their farmers and 
offer them subsidies. 
While many of these non-formal groups show courage and ingenuity, 
they need a range of tools to help them grow and flourish. The Zunde 
raMambo, revived by the Zimbabwean government, has met 
widespread acceptance in the communities in which it has been put 
into place, but the resources are pitifully inadequate and the scheme is 
too narrowly conceived, according to the authors, to be of much use. 
People living in poverty on the land need to be helped as communities 
to flourish, but careful planning is needed: unsuccessfully growing 
communal crops can help no more than unsuccessfully growing 
privately-owned family crops. According to both the Zambian and 
Zimbabwean papers, the key to informal social security is to make the 
land productive and to develop small-scale agricultural enterprises. 
Only then will the rural majority be able to establish flourishing nonformal 
social security systems, whether based on the economic wealth 
of the extended family, the village or the clan. 
The strength of the community-based, small-scale systems are that 
they are flexible, responsive, unbureaucratic, based on trust and 
honesty, locally-controlled and owned, cheap to run and relatively easy 
to service. Strengthening their social and institutional capacity is 
necessary and they should be made one of the channels of povertyeradication 
programmes. They can be supported by a host of strategies, 
give the political will of governments and others. 
Triage and a moral community 
It is often argued that provision of social welfare in general is too 
expensive for developing countries. This is reminiscent of the ethical 
arguments for triage. Triage is a medical practice developed to deal with 
large-scale calamities, deaths on the battlefield and so on. It is a set of 
principles used to select for treatment only those victims whose lives 
could be saved, or who would respond to treatment, rather than
spending scarce time attending to those who will clearly die. 
Philosophers usually argue over the ethics of triage in relation to the 
moral duty of the rich countries to help the poor in other countries 
survive. What we know is that triage is being applied within our own 
countries, by our own governments, every day. Compared with rich 
individuals and corporations in the West, many rich individuals and 
institutions in our own countries do not seem so very rich: in fact, they 
seem poor. But those who are the beneficiaries of formal social security 
are rich by comparison with those who are not. 
Richard Rorty (1996) points out that if "the rich", however defined, 
are prepared to sacrifice "the poor" by using triage to distinguish who 
will benefit and who will not, they are being either hypocritical, or selfdeceiving, 
or both, to continue claiming that they belong to the same 
moral community. 
.. .those who make the decision about feasibility are answering the 
question "Who are we?" by excluding certain human beings from 
membership in "We, the ones who can hope to survive". When 
we realize that it is unfeasible to rescue a person or a group, it is 
as if they had already gone before us into death. Such people are, 
as we say, "dead to us". Life, we say, is for the living. For the sake 
of their own sanity, and for the sake of the less grievously 
wounded patients who are admitted to the hospital, the doctors 
and nurses must simply blank out on all those moaning victims 
who are left outside in the street.... 
These doctors and nurses illustrate the point that if you cannot 
render assistance to people in need, your claim that they form part 
of your moral community is empty." 
If the idea of a moral community has any significance, Rorty continues, 
it has to take money into account. "Marx may have overstated when he 
identified morality with the interests of an economic class, but he had a 
point." 
This is a painful idea but I think it is true. Moreover, it is a not only a 
political and moral truth, it points to an economic imperative. The truth 
of it should compel policymakers and the rest of us to rethink our
position. It is not recommended that we abandon what little we have 
and redistribute it recklessly to everyone in society. Equality in 
poverty, as Angela Cheater (1984 :13 5) has remarked, scarcely makes a 
feasible political or economic goal. But if we, in our developing nations, 
see ourselves primarily as a moral community, this view has political 
and economic implications. We should take greater steps than we 
have done previously to reschedule our priorities: we have not reached 
the point of triage yet. Do we, for example, need the internecine wars in 
Africa that only make the rich richer, while they impoverish, kill and 
main more and more of the poor, women and children—the very people 
who are part of our moral community; speaking the same language as 
us, believing in the same values, living in the same village, region, 
country, continent? It is not just the rich West that needs to change. 
Could we not redirect the money spent in wars to provide the expertise 
and resources to the self-help schemes that lie bleeding at our feet? 
References 
Cheater, A. 1984: Idioms of Accumulation Gweru, Mambo Press 
Rorty, R. 1996 Moral universalism and economic triage http:// 
www.unesco.org/phiweb/txt/uk/2rpu/rort/