Paper short abstract:

Development, rights, and humanitarian oriented approaches to cash transfers seek distance from connotations of charity. This paper examines how such aspirations are frustrated as the bourse familiale is drawn into idioms of subsistence, contributing to calls to reconsider the place of charity.

Paper long abstract:

The bourse familiale cash transfer was introduced in 2013 as a 'grand projet' at the heart of the Senegalese government’s development plan. It is a conditional cash transfer, backed by the World Bank, and as in the name, was inspired by the more famous bolsa família in Brazil. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork carried out in a small informal settlement in Dakar in 2017-18, and periods of fieldwork since, I ask what kind of social contract emerges in relation to the bourse familiale. Conditionality largely falls away in the Senegalese context, frustrating World Bank development-oriented approaches. The temporary nature of the cash transfer precludes suggestions that this might move it in the direction of rights. More recently the bourse familiale is drawn into logics of assistance increasingly characterised by humanitarianism and crisis. Whether in the name of development, rights, or humanitarianism, different attempts are made to put distance between assistance in the form of cash transfers and charity. In this paper, I examine how such attempts are frustrated as the bourse familiale is drawn into idioms of subsistence centred around rice and oil (ceeb ak diwilin). I argue that what might be described as a moral economy of subsistence contributes to anthropological calls to reconsider the place of charity in the twenty first century.