Indigenous Social Provisioning in Sub-Saharan Africa: Exploring Its Transformative Potential for Inclusive Social Policy

With only 15.4 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population covered by formal social protection, most people depend on indigenous social provisioning. Despite their extensive coverage and socio-cultural legitimacy, these arrangements remain marginal in policy design, largely due to their persistent framing as residual, informal coping mechanisms within state-centric paradigms. This paper challenges that framing by conceptualising indigenous social provisioning as an institutionally autonomous domain with transformative potential. Using an integrative literature review, the study analyses key provisioning arrangements across sub-Saharan Africa and maps their functions onto the framework of Transformative Social Policy (TSP), which emphasises production, protection, redistribution, reproduction, and social cohesion. The findings show that indigenous systems extend beyond safety net functions to enhancing productive capacities and supporting livelihoods, redistributing resources, sustaining social reproduction, and fostering social cohesion for collective agency. However, their transformative capacity is often limited by internal inequalities. The paper argues that inclusive social policy requires a shift from substitution to institutional complementarity, in which indigenous and formal systems operate as mutually reinforcing pillars. By foregrounding Africa’s institutional heritage, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonise social policy theory and practice.