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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws from ethnographic research with older people living and working in a diverse Kampala neighbourhood to situate claims for social protection and critically reflect on current policy narratives, particuarlly the roll-out of the Senior Citizen's Grant in Uganda.

Paper Abstract:

This paper draws from ethnographic research with people over 50 living and working in a diverse Kampala neighbourhood to situate claims for social protection and critically reflect on current policy narratives. It leads from participants’ explicit reflections on where state and global infrastructures fall short of expectations for providing formal social protection, such as secure employment and healthcare. Related moral imaginaries are embedded within the social history of the neighbourhood where this research took place, a particularly contested site of 'economic development' since late colonial times. They are also located in a landscape of land struggles, dispossession, regional identity and the ‘conviviality’ of such multi-ethnic urban contexts (Nyamnjoh, 2017). And they are forged through transnational encounters, in dialogue with a ‘social imagination’ (Coe, 2020) of state welfare abroad, as both disparaged and aspirational alternative. In a global context of 'development' and inequality, many people are increasingly reliant on projectified healthcare and unstable forms of employment and mutual support in later life. This paper outlines such relational ‘infrastructures’ (Bear et al, 2021) encountered in Kampala and the cooperative moralities that underpin them, for which the middle generation play a particularly crucial role; neighbourhood organisations, family responsibilities, self-care and precarious self-employment. The focus on ageing and social protection relates to anthropologies of moral personhood, resource distribution and care work. It also allows for timely reflection on current policy narratives around social protection, particularly regarding national health insurance and cash transfers for the elderly in Uganda.