Not until the basic challenges of political administration had been undertaken did the British and French colonial rulers consider expanding the state provision of social services in the Gold Coast and Côte d'Ivoire. State social service provision was minimal until the Great Depression, and really only intensified after World War II. The different histories of political administration established in the earlier part of the colonial era resulted in the subsequent development of contrasting social policies in the Gold Coast and Côte d'Ivoire that continue today. Since divergent political administrative configurations produced different sets of experiences among state and societal actors, state actors had differing views of local social welfare needs, as well as contrasting perspectives on the existing local capacity to fulfill those needs. These different assessments of need and capacity framed the development of divergent colonial and postcolonial social policy in each of the cases.

During the colonial era, social policy in the Gold Coast was seen as supplementing the “traditional” systems of social welfare in the community while, in Côte d'Ivoire, administrators aimed to supplant these “inadequate” systems with more activist policies for individuals. Ironically, despite pressures from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to adopt similar types of social service reforms during structural adjustment programs (SAPs), the formulation of policy and the local experience of state social service provision continued to differ in these two regions in the 1990s.