WELFARE, DELIVERY SYSTEM: ATTITUDES

MY previous articles usually had terms like ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘recipients’ of ‘welfare’ services. One may really wonder; who is really a beneficiary?

When thinking about a welfare recipient or beneficiary, most individuals tend to picture someone who is lazy, demotivated, useless, and less competent than an average person and so on. Some even take it further by having a mental image associated with racial stereotyping and thus, influencing people’s judgement on who is a genuine beneficiary!

The study of community attitudes toward welfare and welfare recipients is an area of increasing interest. This is not only because negative attitudes can lead to ‘stigmatisation’ and ‘discrimination’, but because of the relevance of social attitudes to policy decisions. Individuals can have disparate attitudes toward the welfare system and welfare recipients. For instance, individuals may be supportive of the scope of government welfare policy but be unhappy with its efficiency. Researchers like Keith Payne and Jazmin Brown from the University of North Carolina in The United States of America got interested in studying what people think about welfare recipients and they discovered that most Americans overwhelmingly imagine a black person fitting to be a recipient.

Van 1995 and colleagues presumed that in order to qualify people should possess these characteristics:
Reciprocity: the degree of reciprocation by the poor; what have they done in return, or what will they do in return in the future or having earned support; the more reciprocation, the more deserving. Identity: the identity of the poor; the closer to ‘us’, the more deserving.
Need: the level of need; the greater the level of need, the more deserving.

 Control: poor people’s control over their neediness, or their responsibility for it; the less control, the more deserving.
 Attitude: poor people’s attitude towards support, or their docility or gratefulness; the more compliant, the more deserving.
These impressions have driven me to analyse the West and attempt to probe them in relation to our societies. My hypothesis is that, shedding light on these matters might aid all of us by triggering deeply rooted biases about how resources should be distributed and to whom. In most societies, taxpayers believe there are recipients who are ‘responsible’, thus justified and there are some who are ‘irresponsible’, thus not worthy to receive.

Recipients say benefits are never satisfactory! Swaziland has done modest research about attitudes of recipients towards welfare service systems. The general plight of welfare recipients has long been predictable by both beneficiaries and providers but underlying reasons towards these principles has not been ascertained. Both these parties agree on bureaucracy as a backing factor.

Applicants face eligibility requirements set by government. This has been explained by policies and the economy of the country. Many recipients claim to be manipulated by less personalised bureaucracy and such information has proven to be important to us practitioners because different policy orientations are frequently implemented without the guidance of relevant baseline information. If there were continuous research studies on recipients, the welfare service system would lend itself to a more efficient and workable model.

As a field practitioner I acknowledge that lack of information characterises our understanding of recipients’ attitudes towards welfare provision in the country.

However, some beneficiaries have provided us with some information that typically makes them feel ‘different’ from others. In an attempt to understand their views, I comprehended that, welfare support participation psychologically and sociologically results in stigma and costs in comparison to what they can benefit. Although stigma cannot be easily defined and is relative, some recipients argue that the cost of stigma is more than the participation and economic benefits they receive. Some of the opinions people raised include the following: Welfare makes people lazy, work less and more poor.

Welfare assists people assist others to get on their feet after a crisis like death.
Welfare encourages the youth to have babies.
People need to know more about welfare systems and related policies.

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