Understanding the role of social grants as resources in multi-generational households: Examples from South Africa and Lesotho

This chapter explores how social grants (cash transfers) interact with broader social and economic conditions and intrahousehold dynamics to shape how resources are managed and controlled in households. It focuses on social grants within multi-generational households in the Southern African context, where grants are a critical, often the primary, source of income. Focusing on South Africa and Lesotho, one middle- and one low-income country, both of whose social protection systems have grants for children and pensioners, it examines the role of such grants in a global south context, marked by high unemployment, informal economic activity and poverty. By exploring how cash transfers are directed at individuals but redistributed within and between households, it reveals how public policy shapes social relations and inequalities, often along gender and/or generational lines, thus adding to understanding of the management, control and distribution of money within and between households, in particular in the global south.