Title: Child Grants: Analysis of the NIDS Wave 1 and 2 Datasets
Author(s): Ingrid Woolard, Thabani Buthelezi and Jonathan Bertscher
Date: 2012
This paper provides a brief summary of some key descriptive findings about child grants from the first two waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS). Wave 1 was conducted in 2008 and Wave 2 in 2010/11. The paper has two main purposes – to assess the quality of the NIDS data on child grants and to stimulate discussion of these initial findings with the aim of encouraging more detailed analytical work using the NIDS data.
The Child Support Grant (CSG) is South Africa's largest social cash transfer programme in terms of the number of participants, and is regarded as one of the government's most successful social protection interventions (Samson et al., 2008). Introduced in April 2008, the value of the grant was initially R100 per month but increased over time in line with inflation and at the time of the NIDS Wave 2 survey was worth R250 per month.
The Foster Care Grant (FCG) is designed to provide support for children being cared for outside of their family, particularly orphans or abandoned children. The value of the grant was R710 per month as of April 2010. The Care Dependency Grant is available to children with permanent, severe disabilities. However, because of the small number of children in our sample who report receiving this grant (86 observations), we have omitted them from this paper.