ABSTRACT
Bibliographic searches, confirmed by archival research, highlight the fact that both the relevant practitioner and the corresponding academic literatures, whether focused specifically on African ‘pension’ issues or on formal social security provision more generally, are significantly less voluminous than those relating to other regions of the developing world. In particular, it is possible to highlight a number of long-standing, fundamental, hence chronic, problems which are common to the continent’s systems of social protection, irrespective of the institutional variations. Regionally a very low percentage of the labour force is currently covered by statutory social protection measures in general. More significantly, the vast majority of the active labour forces in most African countries who work in the informal sector, or in subsistence agriculture, still find themselves doubly excluded from access to social protection measures, both private and public.
