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Papers by Thandie Hlabana

Health policy and planning, Jan 20, 2024

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Jan 17, 2024

International journal of care and caring, Mar 8, 2023

Health Policy and Planning

Cash transfers have been increasingly used in low- and middle-income countries as a poverty reduc... more Cash transfers have been increasingly used in low- and middle-income countries as a poverty reduction and social protection tool. Despite their potential for empowering vulnerable groups (especially women), the evidence for such outcomes remains unclear. Additionally, little is known about how this broad concept fits into and is perceived in such programs. For example, Lesotho’s Child Grant Program (CGP) is an unconditional cash transfer targeting poor and vulnerable households with children. The CGP has been presented as one of Lesotho’s flagship programs in developing the country’s social safety net system. Using the CGP’s early phases as a case study, this research aims to capture how program stakeholders understood and operationalized the concept of economic empowerment (especially women’s) in Lesotho’s CGP. The qualitative analysis relied on the triangulation of information from a review of program documents and semi-structured key informant interviews with program stakeholders...

Qualitative Inquiry, Oct 12, 2022

In this article, we reflect on the ethical challenges we confronted when conducting research in M... more In this article, we reflect on the ethical challenges we confronted when conducting research in Malawi. Between 2015 and 2019, we engaged as a multinational team in several phases of ethnographic and participatory research with members of a rural community that most of us had worked with a decade earlier. The research contributed to a project that explored the impacts of social cash transfers 1 on relations of age, gender and generation within rural communities in Malawi and Lesotho. Research on development interventions like cash transfers is positioned in relation to the economic inequalities that exist globally. But these economic inequalities also shape the context and social relations of the research process itself in ways that institutional ethics codes fail to adequately address, and as a consequence of which they may even cause harm. There are profound inequalities between the lives and access to resources of Western academics and people in impoverished rural communities, an area of tension that has been widely explored (e.g., Sikes, 2013; Walsh et al., 2016). However, research relations, particularly in larger projects, are not restricted to a binary distinction between Western academics and poor participants, but involve a range of differently positioned actors. Economic inequalities exist at all levels within the varied contexts and relations of a research project and require an ethical response. Our starting point is the instruction we were given by a Malawian ethical review committee not to provide any form of compensation to rural people for participation in our research-a requirement they justified on the basis of the "universal" bioethical principle of informed consent. Many scholars have critiqued the notion of universal ethical principles, demonstrating how they embed Western thought and arguing for research in non-Western contexts to be 1124631Q IXXXX10.1177/10778004221124631Ansell et al.Ansell et al.

I, Thandie Hlabana, do hereby declare that this is my own work supervised by Professor Akim Mturi... more I, Thandie Hlabana, do hereby declare that this is my own work supervised by Professor Akim Mturi, and all other people's work has been fully acknowledged. This work has not previously been submitted for an award of any degree. Signed:

Qualitative data was collected mainly in two villages, one in southern Malawi, the other in the M... more Qualitative data was collected mainly in two villages, one in southern Malawi, the other in the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho exploring the impacts of three social cash transfer schemes (pensions and child grants in Lesotho; poverty-targeted grants in Lesotho). The main focus was the ways in which cash transfers shape social relations within families and communities, particularly relations of generation, age and gender. Transcripts from three methods of data collection are included: 1) Interviews with members of households that receive cash transfers (n=77) exploring the impacts of the transfers on relations within and beyond the family. 2) Interviews with young adults in the communities ('previous participants' who participated in an earlier study). These explore changes in the young people's lives over the preceding decade as well as their perspectives on social cash transfers. Young adults in cash transfer recipient households were also asked to talk about the impacts o...

The Coronavirus Crisis and Challenges to Social Development, 2022