Michael W. Kpessa

Nationalism, development, and social policy: The politics of nation-building in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract This article examines the relationship between nation-building and social policy in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It argues that post-independence nationalist leaders used health, housing, and education programmes to foster a sense of national unity that would transcend the existing ethnic divisions created by the arbitrary drawing of state boundaries during colonization. Yet, in SSA, the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s favoured the decline of state-level integration and solidarity, which helped trigger territorial mobilization and fragmentation. As a consequence, the politics of welfare retrenchment in SSA does more than simply reduce benefits and increase inequalities; it also potentially weakens national unity.

The Politics of Public Policy in Ghana: From Closed Circuit Bureaucrats to Citizenry Engagement

This article examines the trajectories and approaches to public policy making in Africa. Using process tracing interlaced with analysis of historical records, secondary literature, and elite interviews, the article shows that since the 1990s, policy making in some African countries, especially Ghana, has been witnessing a gradual shift away from bureaucratic approaches to policy making to the ones that directly engage the citizenry through consultation and open public participation. The article shows that this shift to citizenry participation is largely due to an emphasis in the development literature on good governance broadly defined to include public participation, and the view of civil society as a platform for social transformation. The article provides a step-by-step analysis of strategies used in recent social security reforms in Ghana to illustrate this change in approach to public policy, and shows that public participation approach to policy making is fraught with several structural challenges and impediments that not only privilege elites’ preferences over the unorganized rural dwellers but also questions some of the fundamental principles of the good governance mantra.

Ideas, Institutions, and Welfare Program Typologies: An Analysis of Pensions and Old Age Income Protection Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Since the 1980s, social policy research shifted attention from institutional development of welfare programs to what were described as crises of the welfare state in an era of austerity. Much of the scholarly debate in this area had focused on the maturation of welfare programs, especially the post-war old age income support programs in the advanced industrialized countries to the neglect of social protection in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. This paper is intended to bring the dynamics of social policy in SSA countries into the comparative welfare dialogue and into the global social security debate in particular. Using a historical institutionalist approach, this study analyzes the trajectories of old age income support development in SSA countries through a careful study of old age income security or protection strategies in the region across time and space. The paper develops ideal typologies for understandings variations and transformations of pensions and old age income provision programs in the region. In doing this, it argues that the ideas and institutions around which recent rounds of pension reforms revolves have always been at both the foreground and background of old age income protection thinking and practices in SSA countries since the pre-colonial era.

A Comparative Analysis of Pension Reforms and Challenges in Ghana and Nigeria

Ghana and Nigeria recently joined a number of countries that have incorporated fully-funded defined contribution pension programmes into their national social security arrangements. Contemporary analyses of pension reforms, however, continue to focus on middle-income countries in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as on Member States of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, thereby marginalizing recent pension policy reforms in sub-Saharan African countries. This article examines the complete and partial shifts to defined contribution pension programmes in Nigeria and Ghana respectively, and points to a number of contextual and contingency factors that challenge the use of defined contribution schemes as a means to address problems of benefit adequacy in the sub-Saharan African context.

Mapping social policy development in sub-Saharan Africa

Over the years, a large body of literature about social policy development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has emerged. However, due to a concern for pressing humanitarian and development issues, most of the scholarship devoted to contemporary African social policy is not grounded in systematic theoretical models aimed at explaining policy differences between and within countries. Because a large body of literature has been published in recent decades to tackle this type of issue within the advanced industrial world, it is important to assess the relevance of existing theories of social policy development for policy analysis in SSA. This article makes a direct contribution to the comparative welfare literature because it draws attention to the limitations of existing theories for understanding social policy development in Africa, while highlighting their relevance for the analysis of the development and transformation of social programmes in the regions countries.

Transnational actors and the politics of pension reform in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent scholarship on transnational actors and on the role of ideas in policy change, this paper analyzes the regional context of the pension reform debate in Sub-Saharan Africa, and shows that, at least since the 1980s, there was significant attention to pension reforms in Africa by global policy actors, including the World Bank. However, unlike in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, where the World Bank proved dominant, the regional environment of pension reform in Sub-Saharan Africa was characterized by a fierce competition between the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO), with each institution promoting different policy preferences. As demonstrated, in Sub-Saharan Africa pension reform, the ILO has proved more influential than the World Bank. Theoretically, the paper stresses the role of transnational actors in the global diffusion of social policy ideas. Recognizing the need to explore the interactions between national and transnational actors, as well as between transnational actors themselves, the analysis explores the dialogical and competitive nature of the global politics of ideas.

Provident Funds Pension Programs in English-Speaking Sub-Saharan Africa: A Look in the Rear Mirror and Lessons for the Future

Pension reform has been on the social policy agenda in many countries throughout the world since the mid-1980s. The main debate has been whether to transform existing defined benefit pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social insurance programs into private pension plans based on defined contributions or maintains them. While many countries throughout the world especially those in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe have opted for private pensions involving the partial or full replacement of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) state pensions by systems of privately managed individual retirement accounts, pension reforms in English-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries have focused on converting post-independence defined contributions schemes known as provident funds into defined benefit PAYG social insurance schemes particularly from the 1990s. This paper analyzes the previous experience of English-speaking SSA countries with provident funds and show that pension plans that are designed on the principles of defined contribution are evidently venerable to several socio-economic and political factors especially in the context of developing countries. The paper provides useful lessons for countries like Ghana and Nigeria that have recently re-introduce defined contribution pension plans.