The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa

Palgrave Macmillan, November 2025/309 pages

By Daniel Béland, Rosina K. Foli, and Privilege Haang’andu

November 27, 2025

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown threatened the social, political, and economic systems of most countries on the planet. Considering its disruptive impact on the socio-economic structures of developed countries like Canada, questions of how such a transformative crisis would impact developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, were well founded.

Prior to the pandemic, the health systems in most developing countries were already weak, with health logistics deeply connected to developed countries through funding, supply chains, and expertise. Besides the concerns about how these health systems would hold up in the face of a pandemic situation that was fluid, there were also concerns with the socio-economic systems.

Most economic activities in sub-Saharan Africa still lie in the informal domain, requiring high physical contact. With weak social policy architecture superintended by the state, social support in sub-Saharan Africa has largely been based on kinship and communal relations. When you map a fluid pandemic situation onto these characteristics, one could not fault those who predicted that the pandemic could have an apocalyptic outcome for countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

While most of sub-Saharan Africa was spared from these grim predictions, the pandemic was nonetheless a public health crisis on a scale not seen since the worst days of AIDS in the 1990s. Vaccine nationalism led to disruptions in supply chains and financial aid. These exposed the fragility of health, education, economic, and political systems, among others.

As elsewhere, there were questions about how critical systems could be made to withstand future shocks. Consequently, there was a post-crisis policy imperative to ensure that countries in sub-Saharan Africa can be better prepared for the next pandemic.

Our new open-access anthology, The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa — part of the Palgrave Macmillan Global Dynamics of Social Policy series — explores how the social policy architecture of Sub-Saharan African countries can be reframed to protect citizens in future crisis situations and beyond. Our focus on social policy is informed by key concerns about how society can support its most vulnerable members.

By interrogating social policy reform, the book maps the state of social policy in sub-Saharan Africa while offering a roadmap to those who seek to improve the social safety net of the 48 countries of this demographically and economically growing region, which Canadian media and policymakers pay far too little attention to.

The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa features chapters written primarily by scholars and practitioners from, or based in, Africa. To map and illustrate recent social policy developments on the continent, it features discussions of a variety of key topics, including the role of social programs as automatic stabilizers that play a positive macroeconomic role during economic downturns, the challenges facing health care systems, the need to deeply reform education systems to increase their effectiveness, and the relationship between human rights and policy responses to public health crises.

The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa features chapters written primarily by scholars and practitioners from, or based in, Africa.

At the same time, the book pays close attention to the fate of vulnerable populations such as persons with disabilities as well as migrants and refugees. We also explore the role of formal and informal social protection arrangements as they relate to gender, and the social media engagement of young people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, we include a discussion of how social policy “need” is defined in different contexts, and how transnational actors continue to shape social reform in sub-Saharan African through their close interactions with domestic and local actors.

More broadly, through illustrating the gaps in sub-Saharan African countries’ social policy infrastructure, our volume demonstrates that countries need multifaceted approaches to build resilient social policy systems. We propose that social policy systems in Africa must be self-reliant, inclusive of demographic diversities, open to learning from best practices around the world, and also structured to respond to global crises.

There are several specific policy recommendations for sub-Saharan African countries.

First, while it is important for these countries to sustain their pre-existing indigenous, family-driven safety nets, they should also pay attention to the global evolution of social policy programs and draw lessons to continuously restructure their own. We propose that legitimate, credible, and resilient social policy institutions and systems rooted in sub-African context could emerge through a combination of lesson-drawing (i.e., assessing policies implemented in other countries) and translation (i.e., adapting these policies to one’s jurisdiction).

Second, we recommend that sub-Saharan African countries reconstruct their social policy systems within the broader context of institutional reforms, good governance, and economic management. This is because strong social policy systems are a product of coherent and self-reinforcing institutional frameworks. In sub-Saharan Africa, despite many countries being endowed with rich natural resources, their formal economies have remained small, their institutions weak, and their social policy systems heavily reliant on foreign aid. This combination of factors exacerbated Africa’s vulnerability during COVID-19 and must be addressed to avert similar catastrophes in the future.

Third, sub-Saharan African countries should broaden economic growth through industrialization. As seen in other jurisdictions around the world, the relationship between economic growth and resilient social policy provision is inextricable. We argue that industrialisation boosts economic activity, creates jobs, and provides a basis for revenue collection that bolsters disbursements of citizens in moments of vulnerability.

Fourth, we recommend that sub-Saharan African countries build robust capacities and systems for taxation. This is because a country’s fiscal strength has corresponding implications for its capacity to support strong social safety nets for its citizens, especially in moments of crisis and acute vulnerability. A country’s taxing power is central not only to the state’s capacity to raise revenue, but also to its capacity to provide goods and services and to support a market economy.

In conclusion, we recommend that sub-Saharan African countries pursue the diffusion of social investment as a new policy paradigm that reconciles social policy with economic rationality through an emphasis on measures that increase labour market participation while fostering human capital through investments in things such as training and early childhood education.

Among our other conclusions, the pandemic and its lessons reinforced the reality that leveraging social investment and social spending is a much more effective response than austerity to such a systemic crisis.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.

Rosina Foli is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ghana.

Privilege Haang’andu is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Canada School of Public Service and Senior Policy Advisor at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.