Cash grants help Lesotho’s poorest
Orphaned and poor children are getting registered and into schools
Masheoa Mojela has lost her own three children but takes care of her three grandchildren. Her village in the Makhoarane district is half an hour from Lesotho’s capital Maseru, in a country with extremely high levels of HIV, unemployment and poverty, and her situation is by no means unique. However, she receives a cash grant that helps her feed and buy school uniforms for the children.
Mojela’s household benefits from the Lesotho Child Grants Programme (CGP), an unconditional programme that is now delivering a predictable quarterly cash transfer with education and health benefits to over 26 000 households across the mountain kingdom, reaching about 80 000 children below the age of 18. Over 350 000 Basotho children are orphaned — almost 20% of the population — of whom 125 000 are considered to be vulnerable, and many of whom are cared for by older siblings or ailing grandparents.
The CGP is run by the ministry of social development, with financial support from the European Union (EU) and technical support from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The EU and UNICEF began with the grant system in 2007, with the Lesotho government assuming full responsibility for the rollout of the programme in 2013.
The grants vary in size between 360 and 750 Maloti (1 Loti = 1 Rand), depending on the number of children per household. The money only covers a fraction of each family’s needs, but it does help to cover the hidden costs of education such as school uniforms, shoes and transport, and provides a measure of stability to those living on or below the poverty line.
Beneficiaries are selected through a careful process of community validation and a National Information System of Social Assistance (Nissa) has been developed as a database that ranks households according to their levels of poverty. This has helped to inform targeting of beneficiaries, as well as managing and monitoring other social protection programmes.
The El Niño weather phenomenon of 2015 caused an unprecedented drought in Lesotho that affected about a third of the population, and brought the staple maize crop production down by 89% in comparison to the previous agricultural season. Successive crop failures have brought poverty to almost 80% of the Basotho. In response to this crisis, which has been declared a State of Emergency by the Lesotho government, cash topups were linked to the CGP, which brought further relief to 23 000 ultrapoor households such as Mojela’s.
The long-term objective of the CGP is to improve the living standards of orphans and vulnerable children to reduce malnutrition, improve their health and increase school enrolment.
Several projects have also been implemented to bolster the CGP. One of these is run by the Catholic Relief Services in Mokhoarane. On a short field trip to the area, we visited a savings scheme group meeting administered by the project, which helps child grant recipients to invest their savings productively. Members of this group from Mokhoarane reported making substantial savings, and in times of need, cash can be borrowed from such groups at reasonable rates, instead of the cutthroat rates offered by moneylenders.