Poverty traps and social exclusion among children in South Africa
Children suffer greatly from poverty and are likely to endure its consequences over their lifetime if there is no means of escaping it.
Highlights
success in reducing poverty, both in money terms and in multi-dimensional forms of deprivation such as lack of access to important services such as water and sanitation. This applies particularly to children, who in a period of declining fertility were also the nominal beneficiaries of the Child Support Grant, which contributed much to a strong decline in money metric poverty and in the number of children who go to bed hungry.
Given this decline in poverty and deprivation, it is disturbing that there is still such widespread evidence of considerable and deep-rooted poverty amongst children. The first aspect of this research project particularly set out to do was to determine to what extent children are still caught in a poverty trap, i.e. a ”self-reinforcing mechanism which causes poverty to persist”, or are socially excluded from important aspects of economic and political life. As poverty traps are self-perpetuating, they require strong interventions to break the cycle and provide ways for children to escape poverty and embark on a course towards a different future.
The research covered a wide spectrum. It included a vast sweep of international literature, and drew on existing empirical evidence on child poverty and poverty traps, as well as gathering new evidence from South African datasets such as household surveys, censuses, school tests, and demographic and health surveys. The research is presented under five broad headings relating to the dimensions that may serve as poverty trap mechanisms, viz. health and nutrition, education, wealth and assets, social networks and family, and geography. Substantial new research was conducted on aspects such as poverty traps, multiple deprivation, migration, and low learning trajectories.
The picture that emerges from this empirical overview is in many respects a worrying one. Though the number of children affected by poverty has declined, factors such as weak education and poor parenting mean that many children still remain in the grip of poverty and there is little evidence that this situation is improving. The spatial distribution of poverty has also not changed much since the political transition, with poverty being particularly prevalent in regions that were part of the former homelands.
Addressing these problems should be a central concern in order to provide children with a way out of the pattern of inherited poverty and limited future prospects.
For this reason, the report offers a number of recommendations for government that would reduce poverty and help to break poverty traps. Two sets of recommendations that stand out relate to education. The first set relates to Early Childhood Education, where there is evidence that community based Early Childhood Development (ECD) facilities and Grade R in schools do not pay enough attention to education quality. In this field, recommendations are made regarding inter alia strengthening the background of ECD teachers so that they are better able to provide the cognitive development that young children need. The second set of recommendations relates to the early school years or Foundation Phase (up to Grade 3). Here it is recommended that a widely accepted goal that everyone can identify with should be identified as a central priority, and that this should be that every child should read (or in a less abbreviated form: By age 10, every child should be able to read fluently in his or her home language). This would focus energies in the Foundation Phase in the same way as the matric examinations do in high school. Together, these two recommendations could improve the low learning trajectories exhibited by many poor South African children, and thereby help to extricate a generation of children from a cycle of poverty.
