It is the desire of APEPTS Welfare Association to promote the idea of welfare networking that can lead to making African countries embrace and realize formation of Welfare states. East African community is not an exceptional since it is the launch pad for the making of the Welfare States in the continent.
The welfare state is a form of government in which the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life.
As a type of mixed economy, the welfare state funds the governmental institutions for health care and education along with direct benefits given to individual citizens. Early features of the welfare state, such as public pensions and social insurance, developed from the 1880s onwards in industrializing Western countries. The Great Depression, World War I and World War II have been characterized as important events that ushered in expansions of the welfare state.
The modern welfare state emerged in a reactive way to the Great Depression of the 1930s as a form of state interventionism to address unemployment, lost output and collapse of the financial system. By the late 1970s, the contemporary capitalist welfare state began to decline, in part due to the economic crisis of post-World War II capitalism and Keynesianism and in part due to the lack of a well-articulated ideological foundation for the welfare state.
Etymology
The German term sozialstaat (“social state”) has been used since 1870 to describe state support programs devised by German sozialpolitiker (“social politicians”) and implemented as part of Bismarck’s conservative reforms.
The literal English equivalent “social state” did not catch on in Anglophone countries.[7] However, during the Second World War, Anglican Archbishop William Temple, author of the book Christianity and the Social Order (1942), popularized the concept using the phrase “welfare state” Bishop Temple’s use of “welfare state” has been connected to Benjamin Disraeli‘s 1845 novel Sybil: or the Two Nations (in other words, the rich and the poor), where he writes “power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE“.
At the time he wrote Sybil, Disraeli (later a prime minister) belonged to Young England, a conservative group of youthful Tories who disagreed with how the Whigs dealt with the conditions of the industrial poor. Members of Young England attempted to garner support among the privileged classes to assist the less fortunate and to recognize the dignity of labor that they imagined had characterized England during the Feudal Middle Age.
The Swedish welfare state is called folkhemmet (“the people’s home”) and goes back to the 1936 compromise, as well as to another important contract made in 1938 between Swedish trade unions and large corporations. Even though the country is often rated comparably economically free, Sweden’s mixed economy remains heavily influenced by the legal framework and continual renegotiations of union contracts, a government-directed and municipality-administered system of social security, and a system of universal health care that is run by the more specialized and in theory more politically isolated county councils of Sweden.
Analysis
Historian of the 20th Century fascist movement, Robert Paxton, observes that the provisions of the welfare state were enacted in the 19th century by religious conservatives to counteract appeals from trade unions and socialism.
Later, Paxton writes “All the modern twentieth-century European dictatorships of the right, both fascist and authoritarian, were welfare states… They all provided medical care, pensions, affordable housing, and mass transport as a matter of course, in order to maintain productivity, national unity, and social peace. Adolf Hitler‘s National Socialist German Workers’ Party expanded the welfare state to the point where over 17 million German citizens were receiving assistance under the auspices of the National Socialist People’s Welfare by 1939.
When social democratic parties abandoned Marxism after World War II, they increasingly accepted the welfare state as a political goal, either as a temporary goal within capitalism or an ultimate goal in itself.
Writing in 2005, Jacob Hacker said that there was “broad agreement” in research on the welfare that there had not been welfare state retrenchment. Instead, “social policy frameworks remain secure.
Modern forms
Modern welfare programs are chiefly distinguished from earlier forms of poverty relief by their universal, comprehensive character. The institution of social insurance in Germany under Bismarck was an influential example.
Some schemes were based largely in the development of autonomous, mutualist provision of benefits. Others were founded on state provision. In a highly influential essay, “Citizenship and Social Class” (1949), British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall identified modern welfare states as a distinctive combination of democracy, welfare, and capitalism, arguing that citizenship must encompass access to social, as well as to political and civil rights.
Examples of such states are Germany, all of the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, France, Uruguay and New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the 1930s. Since that time, the term welfare state applies only to states where social rights are accompanied by civil and political rights.
The activities of present-day welfare states extend to the provision of both cash welfare benefits (such as old-age pensions or unemployment benefits) and in-kind welfare services (such as health or childcare services).
Through these provisions, welfare states can affect the distribution of wellbeing and personal autonomy among their citizens, as well as influencing how their citizens consume and how they spend their time.
It is our mission to establish social welfare Networks and linkages through tripartite patterns that will create revenue collection base for our respective governments by promoting producers and service providers.
This we shall do by Building up a people prepared in Kenya East Africa Community and beyond.
