The purpose of this document is to define the group of people whom we are considering as
part of the project ‘Lone Mothers in South Africa: The role of social security in respecting
and protecting dignity’. Setting to one side the group of interest briefly (‘lone mothers’), the
project originates from research undertaken for the South African Department of Social
Development (DSD) about attitudes to employment and social security (Noble et al., 2008;
Ntshongwana and Wright, 2010a and 2010b; Ntshongwana et al., 2010; Surender et al.,
2007; Surender et al., 2010). During the fieldwork for that programme of research,
participants in focus groups repeatedly made the unprompted point that poverty eroded
their sense of dignity. Given that the South African Constitution declares that people have
inherent dignity and that dignity should be protected and respected (Republic of South
Africa, 1996), we decided to dedicate a separate project to exploring the role that social
security currently plays in relation to people’s sense of dignity. Specifically we hoped to
explore whether social assistance, as a financial transfer to low income people, serves to
help to protect and respect people’s dignity, or conversely whether there are ways in which
the country’s social security arrangements serve to undermine people’s dignity.   
Currently, there is no social assistance for low income people of working age, even though
there is a commitment elsewhere in the Constitution to the progressive realisation of access
to social assistance for people, and their dependants, who are unable to support themselves
(Republic of South Africa, 1996: Chapter 2 section 27). We therefore wanted to additionally
explore whether people thought that – in the context of very high levels of unemployment - 
some additional form of social assistance might be a worthwhile poverty alleviation
measure that would help to protect and respect people’s sense of dignity, or whether it
might serve to further erode people’s sense of dignity.