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Paper short abstract:

Taking the case of the bourse familiale cash transfer in Senegal as a starting point, this paper examines how continual experimentation with giving cash is pulled between dynamics of charity, financialization and crisis in a way that challenges ideas about the consolidation of welfare states.

Paper long abstract:

The bourse familiale is a national cash transfer introduced in Senegal in 2013 as a grand projet at the heart of the government’s new development, or ‘emergence’ plan. A direct nod to the more famous bolsa família in Brazil, it has come to encompass a ‘welfare state rhetoric’ (Olivier de Sardan & Piccoli 2018: 5) in a comparable way. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork on social protection and poverty in a small informal settlement in the capital, Dakar. Situating the bourse familiale in ideas about the possibilities of a ‘quiet revolution’ from over a decade ago, the first half of the paper demonstrates how the bourse familiale itself is received as a form of aid or charity rather than amounting to a state obligation or right or share. To do so I attend to the language used to describe it and the way it came to be conflated with earlier charitable projects. The second half of the paper moves to consider the way the bourse familiale has come to sit alongside a set of logics characterised by financialization and crisis, demonstrated through discussion of Yook Koom Koom (increase the economy), an adjacent project aimed at entrepreneurialism, and cash aid received during Covid-19 and again in the wake of the war in Ukraine. I conclude by suggesting that ongoing experimentation with giving cash, pulled as it is between dynamics of charity, financialization and crisis, works to undermine the consolidation of a welfare state.