Erasibo

Who are the poor? How many poor are there? How do we improve their quality if life? These are not as easy to answer as you might think. It is widely acknowledged that South Africa is confronted by an unacceptably high rate of poverty. Yet it would seem that being able to identify and target vital programmes at the poor is not simply achieved.

Government departments and institutions apply varying standards and criteria when it comes to determining who qualifies for service. In many cases these varying standards and criteria do not align and what results is people who qualify for one service not being able to qualify for another e.g. two old age pensioners who live in the same household and both receive state pensions may not qualify for Free Basic Service benefits from their municipality because jointly their income exceeds the income threshold set by the municipality.

The president has talked about ensuring that those who are need are able to access the “social package” of services.

A society in which large sections depend on social welfare cannot sustain its development. Our comprehensive programme to grow the economy, including the interventions in both the First and Second Economies, improving sustainable livelihoods and create work is meant precisely to ensure that, over time, a smaller proportion of society, in particular the most vulnerable, subsists solely on social grants.

Unfortunately when you read through a lot of the policy documents authored by government you see very little indicating that they have given consideration to where their programmes fit into a broader social package of services and therefore how their programme will best assist with poverty alleviation. This lack of an integrated view on how programmes need to be dove tailed coupled with the multiplicity of views on the poor, burdens government across all three spheres unnecessarily.

Being able to know who you are meant to service not only helps in targeting but also allows you to better plan, manage public funds and monitor and evaluate the success of your programme.

I am not for one second suggesting that government is not aware of this. They are aware and carefully – correctly so – they are moving towards dealing with the issue of developing a single view on who the poor are. Statistics South Africa has been tasked with developing a national poverty line, the purpose of this poverty line is explained as:

The nature of poverty, vulnerability and income inequality, and their shifts in response to economic trends and policy, need to be better understood if poverty reduction and social development programmes are to be well designed and effective. An appropriate index to assist in measuring and tracking poverty over time is therefore a useful statistical instrument for research and analysis. It can also serve as a reference measure for various policy purposes, such as the allocation of resources for poverty-focused spending programmes or the assessment of social and development needs.

We now have movement towards obtaining agreement on a universally accepted definition of who the poor are. All we need now is for departments to recognise that they do not work in silos, independently from each other and that in order to be able to give poor families who have not as yet realised the basic (service) benefits of our new democracy a greater sense of their “human dignity”. The fact that government has established the cluster system for departments and put into place legislation like the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Act [13 of 2005] are all steps towards better synchronisation of efforts, but much work needs to be done within the corridors, meeting rooms and offices of government.

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