Dr Vayda Megannon is a sociologist and feminist political economist at the University of Cape Town, working at the intersection of digital welfare systems, social protection, and care economies in Southern Africa. Her research examines how automated welfare systems reshape experiences of poverty, household survival strategies, and gendered care relations — and what it means for people living at the margins when both the state and the family fail to care.

Her doctoral dissertation, Experiences of Unemployment and Poverty: The COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant, draws on qualitative research with forty-one participants across Khayelitsha and KwaBhaca to examine how South Africa’s first working-age social grant operated in practice. The research developed two original conceptual contributions: the Welfare Care Penalty — demonstrating how women’s unpaid care labour generates systematic exclusion within automated welfare eligibility systems — and Boundary Parity, a normative principle for designing fairer and more context-sensitive social protection. This work was recognised with the James and Khadija Midgley Excellence Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alongside her research, Vayda is Regional Programme Manager of UCT’s Family Caregiving Programme, leading a four-country study on family care of older persons across South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, and Namibia. A member of South Africa’s Universal Basic Income Coalition and the Coalition for Inclusive and Safe Digital Transformation, her work speaks to emerging policy debates on digital welfare systems, universal income guarantees, and the political economy of care in the Global South. She has collaborated with the World Bank, Centre for Global Development, International Labour Organisation, and Black Sash, and her public scholarship has appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and GroundUp.