Producing Care in Older Persons Households in South Africa

Social grants are the main income in many households in South Africa. The paper focuses on the redistribution of social grants in Older Person Grant (OPG) receiving households. It unpacks the (care) work involved in managing ‘care’ costs in OPG households in ways that expand our understanding of care work but also sheds light on how livelihoods are sustained in low-income households. This paper draws on findings from a mixed methods study about the economic precarity of OPG households in South Africa. Whilst budgetary analysis reveals the changing landscape of financing elder care at the macro level, semi-structured interviews with 100 caregivers and 100 older persons (care receivers) outline the ways in which caregivers and receivers at the micro level develop multiple strategies to enable family members to meet the basic needs of the household. The article adopts a social reproduction approach to uncover the work involved in ‘financing’ care and enabling care work to happen in low-income households. In contributing to scholarship from the Global South, the paper highlights the interdependence of producing resources (food, shelter, energy etc) and reproductive labour at the household level that is shaped by gendered, racialised, classed and locational divisions.