Paper short abstract:

My contribution will engage the question of whether and under what conditions cash transfers could be reparative using ethnographic data from South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Current scholarship and activism on cash transfer in South Africa focuses heavily on the need to universalise grants to create more just social protection systems. However, my fieldwork shows that most understandings of universal basic income think about universalism at the moment of qualification, but not the moment of distribution. In a country like South Africa, we could universalise cash transfers tomorrow, and the people who most need them would still struggle to receive them due to ongoing geographies and infrastructures of apartheid. I contend that much more focus needs to be on building reparative cash transfer delivery systems to transcend these legacies of segregation.