History in the new South Africa: an introduction - Det danske ...

4 Who are the poor? The size and structure of the
poverty problem
By David Everatt
Tables
Table 1: Different models for defining poverty
Table 2: Indicators used to construct the poverty index
Table 3: Poverty by province 1996 and 2001
Table 4: Poverty index scores for all nodes and South Africa, 1996 and 2001
Table 5: Indicator and overall poverty scores for South Africa, 1996 & 2001
Table 6: Indicators by node, 2001 (ISRDP)
Table 7: Indicators by node, 2001 (URP)
Graphs
Figure 1: ISRDP nodes (Source: www.dplg.gov.za)
Figure 2: The URP nodes (Source: www.dplg.gov.za)
Figure 3: Poverty scores for South Africa, ISRDP & URP, 1996 and 2001
Figure 4: Poverty by province, 1996 and 2001
Introduction 8
Tackling poverty in South Africa is probably one of the very few areas where consensus
exists across political, racial and other lines of division. But the agreement stops right
there – it does not cover how poverty is understood, how it is defined, who is and who
isn’t poor, what to do to about poverty, and so on. This is true within the ruling tripartite
alliance (comprising the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist
party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade unions (COSATU)), as well as
beyond it.
Our concern here is less with the debates and disputes over poverty, which have been
analysed elsewhere 9 , than with an attempt to outline the scale and nature of poverty in
South Africa. To do so, the chapter uses data from the 1996 and 2001 censuses, and
focuses on the 21 poorest ‘nodes’ in South Africa: 13 in rural areas comprising the focus
for the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme (ISRDP)and 8 doing the
same for the Urban Renewal Programme (URP).
The chapter is based on work done for the Department of Social Development (DSD),
which has commissioned socio-economic and demographic baseline studies in the 21
nodes. The views presented in this paper are those of the author and do not represent
positions of the South African Department of Social Development. These nodes were
selected because of the deep poverty in which many of their citizens live, though it is
unclear what variables were used to identify the nodes. The ISRDP and URP aim to
transform their respective nodes into economically vibrant and socially cohesive areas
8 Thanks to Ross Jennings for mastering census data and extracting the statistics used here.
9 These issues are discussed in detail in Everatt D. (2004) ‘The politics of poverty’ in Everatt D. and
Maphai V. (ed.s) The (real) state of the nation: South Africa since 1990 (Interfund, Johannesburg).
27