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Objectives of the Social Dimensions of Adjustments Programme (SDA)!
The problem of poverty, and how to control and in the long term to eliminate it, has been a central issue in the development and planning discourse in Zimbabwe since 1980.
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Indeed, the policies already reviewed above sought to redress the inequalities of the past, but in the long term there was a political vision of an egalitarian society via “growth with equity”, and more broadly through the transformation of society from a settler colonial society to a socialist one, in which there would be no exploitation of man by man. That appeared to be the long-term project of the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and the independent government that came to power in 1980.
That project was no longer pursued with the introduction of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). When ESAP was introduced, an important component was the Social Dimensions of Adjustments (SDA) and the Social Development Fund (SDF), which were set to deal specifically with what were considered as transitory negative effects of ESAP.
However, the experience of SDA strategy and the drought of 1991/92 pointed to the “need to develop a more detailed strategy of Government actions to tackle a broad range of development issues”. This conclusion led to the formulation of the Poverty Alleviation Action Plan (PAAP), a comprehensive policy paper presented at the Consultative Group Meeting in Paris in December 1993.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Objectives of the Social Dimensions of Adjustments Programme (SDA) are to:
i. Protect the poor and vulnerable groups from undue hardships resulting from structural adjustment through the short-term compensation schemes which take the form of direct welfare payments;
ii. Strengthen internal household and community level coping or survival mechanisms and strategies and thereby integrate these groups into the mainstream of the economic reform programme;
iii. Minimise costs to the fiscus through cost recovery programmes in education and health sectors while ensuring that education and health standards are not compromised, at the same time maximising participation and support from third parties, notably NGOs, employee organisations, employer organisations and local authorities and facilitating economic activity;
iv. Generally alleviate poverty and contribute to the improvement of the standard of living of the poorest members of Zimbabwean society.
Programme Design:
The SDA has two major components, namely, the employment and training component as well as the social safety nets programme.
Employment Training and Programme:
This programme was designed to alleviate the suffering of retrenched workers and persons with disabilities. Under this programme, a retrenched worker has two choices:
i. If the individual is still young and would like to acquire some basic practical skills so that he/she can be re-employed within the changing and hopefully expanding economy, then he/she can opt for “hard skills training”.
ii. If a retrenched person feels he no longer wants to be employed by anybody, but would like to be his own employer, then he can opt for the business skills training programme.
Social Safety Nets Programme:
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The social safety nets programme was designed to alleviate the sufferings of the vulnerable low-income groups and the poor adversely affected by the impact of price decontrol, reduced government expenditure and increased cost recovery. The scope of the programme includes:
i. Education assistance:
This involves the payment of school fees for those families earning less than Z$400 per month and which cannot afford the fees which were introduced as a cost recovery measure.
ii. Food Security:
This involves direct cash r subventions to the urban poor who can no longer afford to pay the new food prices (maize meal) that have been brought about by price decontrol measures and removal of subsidies.
This programme is implemented through the Department of Social Welfare, which is sufficiently decentralised up to the district level. Since the programme is to benefit the poor and vulnerable, it implies that it has to proceed based on some form of targeting. Thus, the different components have different targeting and delivery mechanisms.