Social science shows it can contribute to COVID-19 policy-making

In recent weeks, University World News has published a number of articles about universities and their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. These included an article on the multiple and the many-faceted contributions by the 16 members of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA).

Another article reported that leading South African social scientists are calling for greater participation by social scientists in shaping the mitigation policies being produced by the government to manage the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

And an earlier article in 2018 reported on the Sixth African Higher Education Week held in Nairobi, where the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor, then minister of higher education, argued that African universities should be empowered to build on their research capacity to wield influence on the continent for evidence-based policy-making and implementation.

Contested and controversial terrain

Policy-making in Africa and everywhere in the world, as the pandemic shows, is a controversial and contested terrain. There is a constant tension between government officials (responsible for policy drafting and implementation) and policy advice.

In Africa in particular, there is a thriving industry of politically connected consultants and academic experts who, like the consultants, are trying to advance their reputations or to line their pockets. And then there are cases where bureaucrats try to write and implement policy, usually with disastrous consequences.

All of this makes it clear that a particular aspect of policy-making that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted is the role of science, and the tension between evidence-based policy and policy driven by political interest groups.

We will ignore the pseudo-science of the president with a nuclear arsenal who suggested that people inject themselves with bleach. The counter to Trump, and a magical plant from Madagascar, is evidence-based policy, which is far more complicated than reading policy off empirical evidence.

Åse Gornitzka commented that in modern bureaucracies, scientific information enters a crowded and contested space with competing claims from interest groups, practical experience and common-sense wisdom.

Erik Albæk observed that just a few years after evaluation and policy research took many corridors of power and administration by storm during the 1970s, it became depressingly clear that one could only rarely – and with difficulty – prove that research had exerted any specific influence or had any beneficial effect on the policy that was implemented.

A recent University World News article highlighted that in South Africa, against a backdrop of a ministerial advisory committee comprised solely of medical experts, leading social scientists were calling for greater involvement in shaping government’s mitigation policies drafted to manage the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

This is not to understate the fact that South Africa has been ‘blessed’ with such a medical expert group because it is highly qualified to respond to a pandemic. By comparison with the shambolic responses to COVID-19 in so-called ‘first world’ countries, such as Italy, Britain and particularly the United States, South Africa has received international praise for its response, including from the World Health Organization and the United Nations.

Although there may not be any social scientists on the main advisory committee, in the second half of 2019 President Cyril Ramaphosa serendipitously convened a Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC), a group of 19 national and international social scientists (mostly economists) to advise him.

In his first state of the nation address, the president committed to establishing such a council to “ensure greater coherence and consistency in the implementation of economic policy and ensure that we are better equipped to respond to changing economic circumstances”. The presidency has been able to draw on this council when deliberating its response to the pandemic.

Increase in child support grant

With the PEAC, as with the medical sciences, there is a strong quantitative social science base to draw on. A group of economists, led by the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town, made a major input to the announcement of an increase in the child grant. This announcement was part of the government’s US$30 billion plan to boost the economy and relieve the social distress caused by the lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infections.

The Daily Maverick reported that the increase in the child grant ‘corresponded’ with a proposal from SALDRU, which was supported by the C19 People’s Coalition, based at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. It argued that this was the most far-reaching, pro-poor and pro-women mechanism to compensate for the massive loss of household incomes.

This ‘correspondence’ did not happen by accident. There has been a history of engagement with strong research groups like SALDRU and the government in evidence-informed policy-making, which intensified during and after the compilation of the National Development Plan (2011).

The strength of SALDRU is its use of survey data to analyse poverty, inequality and labour markets. Its first major public presence was during the 1984 Carnegie Inquiry into poverty. The inquiry produced more than 300 papers and made some academics household names, such as Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, who provided an unshakeable evidence base of the disastrous realities of apartheid South Africa.

Inclusivity

The processes around the initial policy response to COVID-19 contrast sharply to this apartheid-era marshalling of evidence in opposition to government policy. In the case of COVID-19, the presidency and those working for the presidency, in preparing policy responses, convened an inclusive process to leverage available research strength to work on aspects of the socio-economic response, including labour market support measures. The members of the PEAC were centrally articulated into these engagements.

In effect, a very strong research platform was convened. Despite quite different ideological orientations, each team brought analysis to the table where it was tested and honed. As a consequence, the presidency emerged with a stress-tested evidence base on which to base their policy recommendations to be fed into its formal engagements with the COVID-19 National Command Council.

The SALDRU group worked on aspects of the socio-economic response, including labour market support measures under Dr Kate Philip who had been formally tasked with developing a proposal for the presidency about informal workers. Most of the labour market support measures were macroeconomic or focused on firms and their formally contracted and represented employees.

There was great concern about the lack of any support for the vulnerable informal workers working in either the formal or informal sectors. These workers are administratively invisible in the tax and labour market systems (for example, the Unemployment Insurance Fund) that are used as the key mechanisms to deliver emergency relief to workers.

The team set to work with good data and good research skills. They were able to show that in South Africa (and in Ghana, Kenya and almost any African context), these informal workers are among the lowest earners in the labour market and that they come from very poor and vulnerable households that depend heavily on low earnings. For most of these workers, South Africa’s lockdown meant an abrupt end to their income.

The team explored the consequences and possible instruments to provide the necessary support to informal workers during this crisis. A case was made for emergency relief to be provided through a top-up to the Child Support Grant.

The proposed grant was a means-tested transfer of ZAR440 (US$24.8) per month, to be paid to the primary caregiver for each qualifying child under 18. There would be 12.5 million beneficiaries, the proposed grant was to be small – well below South Africa’s poverty lines – and was not explicitly targeted at informal workers.

Despite this, the research was able to show that a top-up of the Child Support Grant would reach substantial percentages of very vulnerable informal workers either directly or, more likely, through other members of their households who were grant recipients. Moreover, this would make a substantial contribution to ameliorate the shock to their pre-lockdown household incomes and would dampen the disastrous poverty consequences of the lockdown.

Survey data and international linkages

Key to the work of SALDRU is the availability of survey data, provided mainly by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), a statutory body that produces household, labour market and health data, which is made public. A second source of data is DataFirst, which is a data service dedicated to providing access to research data from South Africa and other African countries. It also develops the data skills among prospective users.

An important additional component is the University of Cape Town’s Training Programme in Social Science Research Using Survey Data that SALDRU has run since 1999. Close to 2,000 participants from civil society, South African universities and government have participated in this course. It is not a fee-paying course; the costs of this investment in South Africa’s quantitative research capacity are borne by the Kresge Foundation and other donors.

There are now other training programmes of this kind, and such training is becoming embedded in the graduate training curricula of many South African universities.

An important development during the last decade has been SALDRU’s growth in linkages with international monitoring and evaluation groups. One such group is the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics (with Thomas Piketty) and J-PAL.

J-PAL Africa, based at SALDRU, is perhaps the closest that social science comes to the traditional scientific method by conducting randomised evaluations of, for example, the ‘teaching at the right level’ approach in primary education. Their stated purpose is to build partnerships for evidence-informed policy-making, but they also work in other sectors such as labour markets, urban services and political participation.

In 2019, the co-founders were jointly awarded the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The prize was awarded “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

Lessons

An important lesson from the child grant example is the policy ‘triangle’ between national planning in government, an independent statutory body (Stats SA) and an expert academic research unit (SALDRU), where expertise is not simply a matter of highly rated individual researchers, but based on collaboration with world leaders in the field.

The second point is that it was not individual consultancy, neither from the private sector nor academia, that led to an eventual increase in the child grant. Individuals can play an important role in scrutinising and evaluating policy proposals, but they cannot compete or contribute much to policy formulation in the modern era of longitudinal big data.

Third, despite the destructive Zuma years in South Africa, the foundations for impact were in place: there remained sufficient channels of engagement and goodwill from policy officials who had not given up the fight, and who continued to work with and even nurture the connections with researchers. What SALDRU was able to do was to rely on its enduring interaction with government, as part of a wider expert network, and to seize on the COVID-19 crisis when politicians were in desperate need of legitimacy.

Fourth, universities cannot do it alone. There must be networks of cooperation and interaction. For this to happen, governments in Africa have to join these networks, wean themselves from their favourite consultants and disabuse themselves of the idea that they can do it by themselves.

Pandor argued that African universities should be empowered to build on their research capacity to influence evidence-based policy-making. The example of SALDRU shows that the continent has research universities that can do this.

In this regard it is worth referring back to ARUA and noting that SALDRU hosts one of the alliance’s 13 centres of excellence, the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research. The bigger issue is how to expand this capacity.

A proposed €1 billion (US$1.1 billion) per annum for a collaboration between African and European research universities that will work on the profound demographic, social and environmental challenges facing both continents seems an important step in the right direction.

Professor Nico Cloete is higher education research professor at the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Professor Murray Leibbrandt is the SARChI chair in poverty and inequality research; director of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research; and director of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; and Dr François van Schalkwyk is a post-doctoral research fellow at the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and STI Policy, Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.