Events

The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) invites members of the media, civil society organisations and interested stakeholders to attend a virtual briefing ahead of the Supreme Court of Appeal hearing on the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant.

The briefing will provide an overview of the SRD grant appeal, the constitutional and policy issues before the Supreme Court of Appeal, and the broader implications of the government’s appeal ahead of the hearing on 25 August 2026.

The session is designed to provide journalists and stakeholders with the context needed to understand the legal issues before the Court and the significance of the case for South Africa’s social assistance system.

Event details

Date: Thursday, 13 August 2026
Time: 4 PM
Platform: Zoom

To register for the briefing, please complete the online registration form here.

For enquiries, please contact given.sigauqwe@iej.org.za.

From 13 to 15 June 2026, the Labour Research Service, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung South Africa, and the IEJ convened the second Care Convergence.

The gathering brought together 60 women working as food handlers, community health workers, and early childhood development practitioners. It followed the inaugural convergence held in October 2025.

Participants reflected on their community interventions and their involvement in the first Care Workers’ Day, held on 7 February 2026. That mobilisation helped build solidarity among workers and reinforced the essential contribution care workers make to communities, the state, and the wider economy.

The convergence included an exhibition of workers’ stories, highlighting what motivates their work and the difficulties they encounter while navigating government administration, insecure employment, and the precarious conditions associated with the Expanded Public Works Programme.

Women constitute more than 80% of the workers employed through many of South Africa’s public care programmes. Despite the essential nature of this work, these sectors continue to be characterised by low pay, insecure contracts, and inadequate employment protections.

The convergence demonstrated that food handlers, community health workers, and early childhood educators should not be understood as three unrelated groups facing similar difficulties. They are part of a single, predominantly female care economy on which the state and communities depend.

However, each sector is administered by a different government department, funded through different mechanisms, and governed by different training, registration, and remuneration systems. This fragmentation places significant administrative and financial burdens on workers and compromises the care received by children, older people, people who are ill, and other community members.

A food handler classified as a volunteer, a community health worker employed without pension or provident-fund benefits, and an early childhood development practitioner struggling to register a centre are not separate policy failures. They are symptoms of a system that does not recognise care as essential public infrastructure or care work as skilled employment deserving decent wages and conditions.

The convergence gave the IEJ’s Care Economies team deeper insight into the lived experiences behind this frequently invisibilised work and the fragmented institutions care workers must navigate.

In May 2026, the IEJ’s Rethinking Economics for Africa (REFA) team, in collaboration with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, convened a two-day workshop focused on developing youth as citizen/activist economists.

The convening brought together members of the REFA student chapters from the University of Cape Town, University of Fort Hare, Nelson Mandela University, and Rhodes University to prototype a series of fun, interactive workshops that introduce heterodox economic concepts to students without an economics background.

Participants tested game-based activities that are designed for youth activists to run autonomously without a facilitator. The activities covered: an introduction to the economy; institutions of the South African economy; sectors of the South African economy; and the roles of economists and activist-economists. Facilitation emphasised collaboration, co-learning, and flexibility, encouraging participants to shape the learning process actively. Participants gave valuable feedback on the use of video and digital tools to make the content more engaging.

The workshops highlighted the importance of accessible economic education, peer learning, and creative communication in strengthening youth-led economic justice work. Insights from the convening will guide future programme iterations, including expanded resources, continued collaboration with participants, and further regional engagements.

Millions of South Africans struggled to afford sufficient and nutritious food despite the country’s extensive agricultural and food-processing capacity. Food unaffordability reflected not only changing commodity prices, but also low incomes, unemployment, market concentration, unequal value chains, and weaknesses in public policy.

The IEJ, the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of Pretoria, and the Just Transitions Network co-hosted a two-day symposium on food prices and affordability in South Africa.

The symposium brought together representatives from national and local government, labour, civil society, academia, research institutions, the private sector, and the informal food economy. Participants examined the scale and drivers of food unaffordability, including price formation across food value chains, corporate concentration, household incomes, energy and transport costs, climate pressures, trade, and geopolitical instability.

Discussions moved from diagnosing the crisis to considering practical interventions, including stronger competition enforcement, improved price transparency and market monitoring, strategic food reserves, local processing, crop diversification, public provisioning, and a more coherent national food-affordability policy.

Between 2014 and 2025, fraud perpetrated by government employees and contractors accounted for 75% of all reported social grant fraud, while fraud by beneficiaries accounted for just 17%. On average, only 54 beneficiaries per year were reported for fraud. In the context of approximately 28 million social grant recipients in 2025, this raises serious concerns about the disproportionate focus on policing beneficiaries. Our factsheet shows that the scale of resources dedicated to detecting beneficiary fraud is unjustifiable, particularly given the harmful consequences of these measures.

Public concern about fraud in South Africa’s social protection system has grown sharply in recent years. In response, the government has introduced automated and algorithmic measures, including stricter surveillance, biometric checks, and large-scale verification processes. However, these interventions often misidentify wrongdoing, place the burden of compliance on elderly, disabled, and low-income beneficiaries, and result in unfair exclusion.

In this webinar, the Institute for Economic Justice presented new research examining where fraud actually occurs in the social protection system. The discussion explored how current anti-fraud approaches disproportionately target beneficiaries while overlooking systemic sources of fraud, and how these measures are undermining the objectives of social protection.

The webinar featured contributions from Dr Caroline Khene (Institute of Development Studies), Abigail May (Open Secrets), Dr Kelle Howson (Institute for Economic Justice), and Siyanda Baduza (Institute for Economic Justice), who brought perspectives spanning social protection, governance, and digital systems. Together, they reflected on the political economy, design, and impacts of South Africa’s welfare fraud crackdown.

Watch the full webinar:

Across the world, governments face interconnected ecological, social and economic crises. Climate change, widening inequality, debt distress and unstable global supply chains are increasing the urgency of building productive systems that are more resilient, inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), and the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the DTIC) co-hosted the official launch of the G20 report Removing International Obstacles to Sustainable Industrial Policy. The launch took place shortly before the G20 Leaders’ Summit and formed part of South Africa’s contribution to advancing sustainable industrial policy during its G20 Presidency.

The report brings together leading global experts to examine how international trade, investment, intellectual property and financial rules constrain the policy space available to developing countries. It argues that these obstacles make it harder for countries, particularly in Africa and the wider Global South, to diversify their economies, develop higher-value industries, create decent work and pursue a just transition.

Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Zuko Godlimpi presided over the launch. Discussions highlighted the need for coordinated international action to ensure that developing countries have access to the finance, technology and policy tools required to build sustainable industrial ecosystems. Participants also emphasised that the transition must benefit workers and communities while supporting inclusive development and respecting planetary boundaries.

The event reinforced a central message of the report: sustainable industrial policy is essential, but countries cannot achieve it under unequal global rules or with inadequate access to resources.

Watch the report launch

Read and download the report

Read the IEJ’s statement on the outcomes of South Africa’s G20 Presidency

Explore the IEJ’s G20 research and policy engagement

Since becoming a leaders’ forum in 2008, the Group of Twenty (G20) has established itself as a central platform for responding to financial crises and coordinating global economic policy. However, its record on addressing inequality, sovereign debt, ecological breakdown and social insecurity has been far less effective.

The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), the New Economics Foundation, the Center for Economic and Social Rights, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Transforma co-hosted a side event at the G20 Social Summit to launch The G20 at a Crossroads. The report provides an independent assessment of the G20’s impact and considers what must change if the forum is to contribute to a more equitable and sustainable global economy.

The event brought together researchers, policymakers and civil society representatives to reflect on the G20’s record across five areas: reform of the international financial architecture; sovereign debt and development; international taxation; climate finance and the just energy transition; and labour markets and employment.

Discussions considered the gap between the G20’s stated commitment to “strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth” and its limited progress in addressing structural inequalities. Participants also reflected on how successive Global South presidencies have broadened the G20’s agenda, while remaining constrained by unequal power relations, consensus-based decision-making and weak implementation.

The dialogue highlighted the need to place economic justice and sustainability at the centre of global crisis coordination; strengthen accountability; support coalitions advancing structural reform; and expand the meaning of economic stability to include human and planetary wellbeing. These shifts are essential if the G20 is to respond more effectively to debt distress, inequality, climate disruption and insecure work.

Watch the report launch

Read the full report
Read more about the report and its findings
Explore the IEJ’s G20 research and policy engagement

Economic inequality has reached extreme levels globally, concentrating wealth and political power while limiting governments’ ability to finance quality public services, climate action and social protection. Under its theme of solidarity, equality and sustainability, South Africa’s G20 Presidency placed these challenges more firmly on the international agenda.

Partners in the South African Tax Justice Working Group—including Oxfam South Africa, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung South Africa, the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), and the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC)—hosted a high-level dialogue on taxation and global inequality alongside the G20 Social Summit.

The dialogue examined the findings and recommendations of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality. Commissioned during South Africa’s G20 Presidency and chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Committee produced the G20’s first report dedicated to global inequality.

Professor Jayati Ghosh, a member of the Extraordinary Committee and Co-Chair of ICRICT, delivered the keynote address. She emphasised that inequality is shaped by economic policies, laws and institutions—and can therefore be reversed through deliberate policy choices.

The subsequent panel featured Dr Gilad Isaacs, Executive Director of the IEJ; Bodo Ellmers, Director of the Financing for Development and International Financial Architecture Programme at Global Policy Forum; Susana Ruiz, Global Lead on Tax Justice at Oxfam International; and Tengo Tengela, Trade and Industrial Policy Coordinator at COSATU.

Discussions explored whether the G20 can help advance a more progressive international tax system and address the concentration of wealth and corporate power. Participants highlighted the importance of taxing extreme wealth and multinational corporations more effectively, advancing debt relief, supporting the proposed International Panel on Inequality, and strengthening negotiations towards a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

The dialogue also underscored the need for progressive organisations and movements to build alliances across borders and use more inclusive multilateral institutions to carry forward the commitments made during South Africa’s G20 Presidency.

Read the G20 Global Inequality Report
Read about the outcomes of the dialogue
Explore the IEJ’s G20 research and policy engagement