| Social exclusion and Africa south of the Sahara: A review of the literature |
 
The UNDP and IILS have recently initiated a project on "Patterns and causes of social exclusion and the design of policies to promote integration". The project is intended "to lead to increased understanding of the factors causing individuals and groups to be excluded from the goods, services, rights, and activities which, in any given society, form the basis for citizenship". As a first step, regional reviews of the literature on social exclusion are being conducted.
The terms of reference establish a structure for these review in four areas as follows:
"(i) Concepts of exclusion and how they have been applied;
(ii) The extent and pattern of exclusion; the main dimensions, the groups concerned and the social and economic mechanisms at work;
(iii) The interaction between dimensions of exclusion;
(iv) Policies to combat exclusion; their effectiveness - including the roles of legislation, of social and economic interventions aimed at particular target groups, of aggregate economic policy."
In line with the guidelines, the aim of these bibliographic reviews "will be not only to identify the issues raised in the literature, but also to highlight gaps and promising research avenues, and to evaluate the usefulness of the notion of exclusion for analysis and policy in differing social and economic contexts. Since the issue of exclusion has been addressed mainly in the European literature, the viability of the concept in low income contexts requires particular investigation". Also, in limiting the subject, priority should be given to: "access to and exclusion from the labour market and employment, access to productive assets and systems of social insurance (formal and informal); provision of public goods (notably including education and health systems); systems of organization and representation".
The present paper is a review for sub-Saharan Africa. The review examines the English-language literature and focuses on four important dimensions of exclusion:
(i) exclusion from agricultural land;
(ii) exclusion from agricultural livelihood;
(iii) exclusion from formal and informal employment;
(iv) exclusion from organization and representation.
Material on apartheid South Africa has not been tackled, though the difference between the structure of exclusion there and in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is addressed in section 1. The review includes material on both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, but is biassed towards the former. Patterns and processes of exclusion from education and health services, and from social security, needs to be integrated into the account in order to provide a synthesis of the overall structure of exclusion, and its trajectory. This was not done owing to lack of time, though some findings on these aspects of exclusion are integrated into the account, where they impinge on the selected dimensions.
The paper is organized in six sections. The first section discusses concepts of exclusion. The main body of the review examines the four dimensions of exclusion listed above. In each of the sections, material is selected to exemplify different analytical positions, and the review is not intended to be exhaustive. In each section, attention is paid to processes of exclusion, and to ethnicity and gender as social identities which form the basis for exclusionary practices. The final section identifies considers the trajectory of exclusion in terms of changing interrelationships between the dimensions.
The discussions on the four dimensions of exclusion include some comments on policies to combat social exclusion, but no attempt is made to provide an overview of policies. There are important, relevant and complex debates proceeding in relation to a number of key policy issues, including land reform (through the introduction of individual titles to land); democracy; gender; and dismantling apartheid.
| 
