COVID-19, Social Relief, and the Informal Sector: Attitudes toward fairness in the distribution of benefits in Zambia

COVID-19 and Social Relief

Across much of Africa, national governments implemented various social relief efforts to provide social assistance to the poorest households and individuals who became vulnerable due to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social relief efforts included food parcels and emergency cash transfers which provided in-kind and income relief to individuals and households that lost jobs or income. There is evidence from countries such as Botswana, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zambia that COVID-19 relief efforts mostly targeted formal sector workers with access to regular social security benefits thereby by-passing population groups that became vulnerable due to the pandemic such as informal sector workers and the unemployed (Devereux, 2021; Gronbach & Seekings, 2021).  

In Zambia, regular social security benefits primarily target formal economy workers who contribute to national pension schemes. Meanwhile, social assistance schemes, such as the national social cash transfer programme (SCT), mostly benefit the rural population without labour capacity. Thus, the SCT scheme excludes rural smallholder farmers and urban informal economy workers who both have labour capacity.

Afrobarometer’s Round 9 survey, conducted in Zambia in August 2022, offers insights into the perceptions that Zambian citizens had toward the government’s handling of various aspects related to the pandemic. The survey interviewed a nationally representative, random, stratified probability sample of 1,200 adult Zambians which yields country-level results with a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. The survey included questions that addressed the impacts of the pandemic, the extent of social relief provision, and citizens’ perceptions regarding the fairness of social relief distribution. The results, discussed below, show that informal sector workers, students, and youth aged between 18 and 35 years, reported the highest levels of job or income losses yet they also reported the lowest levels of receiving social relief. Informal sector workers, had lower levels of education and experienced more poverty than formal sector workers. Informal sector workers were also much less satisfied with the government’s social relief efforts.

Impacts of the Pandemic

The Afrobarometer survey asked the question: ‘Please tell me whether you personally or any other member of your household has been affected in any of the following ways by the COVID-19 pandemic (since early 2020): (a) Became ill with, or tested positive for, COVID-19? And (b) Temporarily or permanently lost a job, business, or primary source of income?

About a tenth (9%) of the Zambian population became ill with or tested positive for COVID-19, while 30% reported loss of income or jobs due to the pandemic. Figure 1 reports the impact of a loss of income by demographic groups. Informal sector workers – including traders, hawkers, unskilled manual labourers, and artisan or skilled manual labourers such as electricians and plumbers – were the most affected demographic group, with nearly 4 in 10 (39%) of informal sector workers reporting a loss of income due to COVID-19. Other demographic groups that were highly affected by a loss of income are urban residents (36%), people with secondary education (35%), the youth i.e., those aged between 18 and 35 years (34%), and those living in high lived poverty (32%) – measured by the frequency with which households went without access to food, water, medical care, cooking fuel, and cash. People who self-reported as experiencing high lived poverty are those who went without access to basic necessities regularly in the year preceding the survey. This contrasts with those who self-reported experiencing low lived poverty who, had access to basic necessities all the time or lacked access on only a few occasions in the last year. The proportion of females and males who suffered income loss was similar (30%), with both categories reporting the same levels of income loss as the national average. 

Figure 1: Loss of Income due to COVID-19 by Demographic Group

 

A further analysis of the data reveals that 88% of informal sector workers had a secondary education or less compared to 79% of formal sector workers who had post-secondary education. Among the youth aged 18 to 35, only 9% were employed in the formal sector compared to 41% employed in the informal sector. In addition, 37% of survey respondents who experienced high levels of lived poverty were employed in the formal sector ahead of other employment categories. By contrast, only 8% of formal sector workers experienced high lived poverty. These results show that there was substantial overlap between being employed in the informal sector and belonging to other demographic groups that were affected by loss of employment or income.

Distribution of Social Relief

The Afrobarometer survey asked respondents two questions that determined the extent of coverage of social relief and the fairness in the distribution of the relief. The first question asked: ‘Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have you or your household received any assistance from the government, like food, cash payments, relief from bill payments, or other assistance that you were not normally receiving before the pandemic?’ The second question asked: ‘Do you think that the distribution of government support to people during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example through food packages or cash payments, has been fair or unfair?’ The responses to the question ranged from ‘very fair’, ‘somewhat fair’, somewhat unfair’, and ‘very unfair’. The ‘somewhat fair’ and ‘very fair’ responses are measured as ‘fair.’

Table 1 narrows the analysis to economic occupation only and provides a summary of the extent of job and income loss, access to social relief, and perceptions of fairness in the distribution of benefits.

 

Table 1: Distribution of Social Relief

 

The results show that  not only were informal sector workers the most affected by income loss, but only 5% of respondents in this category received any form of social relief – ahead only of students. While only 6% of respondents received social relief on average across the country, more formal sector workers received benefits than the national average. Further, formal sector workers were the most satisfied with the distribution of social relief, at 36% of the population in this category. This compares to 17% of informal sector workers who believed that social relief was fairly distributed, ahead only of agriculture sector workers at 16%.

Afrobarometer surveys cannot account for the reasons informal sector workers appear to have been bypassed by the distribution of social relief. However, a World Food Programme (WFP) report that reviewed the effectiveness of cash-based responses to COVID-19 in urban Zambia showed that interventions like the emergency cash transfers benefitted citizens who had institutional affiliations (World Food Programme, 2021). The WFP working in concert with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), other international organizations and the Zambian government, led the process of targeting and paying benefits to households that became vulnerable due to COVID-19. The emergency nature of the pandemic meant that the WFP and UNICEF had less than a month to target and enroll households to the emergency cash transfers. Beneficiaries were drawn from lists of associations of market traders, domestic workers, hospitality sector workers, and labour unions. Yet, these lists were not comprehensive to capture informal sector workers such as street vendors, hawkers, freelance artisans such as electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, and painters, as well as market traders operating in undesignated trading areas.

Implications for the future

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the precarity of informal sector workers in Zambia and across the African continent. It further demonstrated that Zambia’s existing social protection framework is biased toward the interests of the rural poor at the expense of the urban poor. There are two major lessons to be learned from these findings. First, the Zambian government needs to improve its mechanisms for identifying informal sector workers across the country. Relevant state departments should maintain registries of informal sector workers by economic activity. Second, regular social protection benefits should be extended to the urban poor to cover risks such as sickness and unemployment. While the cost of expanding social protection benefits may be exorbitant for an economy currently dealing with debt restructuring, it is necessary for addressing poverty and improving living standards. Moreover, urban informal sector workers are a salient voting bloc in Zambia and have historically been crucial for swinging the national vote in favour or against incumbent governments (Siachiwena, 2022). Thus, the failure to expand social protection benefits to urban informal sector workers has potential for both economic and political ramifications.

References

Devereux, S. (2021). ‘Social protection response to COVID-19 in Africa.’ Global Social Policy Vol. 21(3): 421-447.

Gronbach, L., and Seekings, J. (2021). ‘Pandemic, lockdown and the stalled urbanization of welfare regimes in Southern Africa.’ Global Social Policy Vol. 21(3): 448-467.

Siachiwena, H. (2022). ‘The Urban Vote in Zambia’s 2021 elections: popular attitudes toward the economy in Copperbelt and Lusaka.’ Journal of Eastern African Studies Vol.16 (4): 600-618.

World Food Programme (2021). Lessons Learnt from an Urban Cash-Based Transfer Response to COVID-19 in Zambia. Lusaka: World Food Programme and the Government of the Republic of Zambia.