eBusiness Weekly
Criselda Kananda
Although social grants and the provision of housing and services to townships have reduced levels of income poverty, the rising inequality cannot be stalled and has been further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic writes the author.
It is time to evaluate the country’s pro-poor policies against the dire situation in which the country (South Africa) finds itself, writes Criselda Kananda.
Despite various interventions to fight poverty, inequality, unemployment and a range of other social ills, when one looks around, it seems like things are just deteriorating even further.
This fight has been at the heart of efforts by social actors, including civil society.
Despite a number of pro-poor policies, almost three decades into its democratic journey, South Africa has a Gini coefficient of over 60, a significant increase since 1994. This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of income or wealth in a country, where one represents perfect equality and 100 represents perfect inequality.
The country that is home to the richest square mile in Africa, has also been found by the World Bank, in its March 2022 report, An Assessment of the Southern African Customs Union, to also be the most unequal country in the Southern African Customs Union region. This is when compared to Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Namibia.
Growing inequality
Almost 18 million or 30 percent of South Africans rely on social grants to meet their basic needs.
Although social grants and the provision of housing and services to townships have reduced levels of income poverty, the rising inequality cannot be stalled and has been further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
To put it simply, two factors have intensified inequality: increasingly concentrated income and wealth; and a sharp rise of inequality even within the African population.
Poverty is very dangerous: in addition to its direct impact on individual family members it endangers and disrupts family functioning. It impacts on the health, well-being and development of individuals, including cognitive engagement and development characteristics, physical health habits, intra-familial relationships and social connectedness, inter alia.
In essence, conditions required for families to be successful, such as stability, security, emotionally positive time together, access to basic resources, and a strong shared belief system, are often lacking in the environment of poverty and, as a result, family relationships typically suffer when individuals live in poverty.
With all of this information at our disposal which affirms the fact that collectively, we are not winning the war against poverty, inequality and unemployment, including with a range of pro-poor government policies and the tireless efforts of civil society, we must ask what must be done.
As the levels of inequality increase both anecdotally and scientifically, it is clear that the status quo cannot continue, and the very fabric of our democracy and social cohesion is being threatened.
Are our solutions appropriate?
It is time for us to relook at the problem before us and ask critical questions about our solutions. We need to be brave and ask if our solutions are the appropriate responses to the intractable poverty and inequality millions of our people are experiencing.
The South African Women in Dialogue (SAWID) has been doing precisely this — looking at the problem at hand with critical eyes.
Having looked at various models of poverty eradication, particularly where success has been achieved, we saw the effectiveness of the Development Caravan approach, a psycho-social, family-based model.
This model puts the family unit at the centre of all poverty alleviation and social support programmes and is a synchronised system for local communities, which aims to harness community self-organisation through targeting families with a basket of services.
Importantly, the model takes a multidimensional view of poverty and through the basket of services, brings together primary healthcare, basic education, food security, housing, and a range of other needs the most vulnerable in our country may have.
The approach grew organically from the perspectives of grassroots women, and their conviction that poverty and family dissolution remained the greatest challenges of the apartheid legacy.
They therefore prioritised personal and societal healing, dialogue, a focus on the family as unit of analysis and a psycho-social, casework approach to family resilience, and envisaged three eventual phases to graduate families from poverty and to establish productive self-reliance in targeted families.
While the model has been implemented in some way through many of the country’s pro-poor policies, it may be time to re-evaluate it against the dire situation in which the country finds itself.
At the end of 2020, SAWID brought out a Trans-disciplinary Research Study entitled, Vulnerability and Indigence Assessment in South Africa: A Civil Society Emergency Response to Covid-19. The study was the product of extensive work done by 17 feminist researchers spread across six workstreams.
The study was conceived and initiated by Chair of the SAWID Development Commission, Dr Vuyo Mahlati, and edited by Prof Lulama Makhubela, Prof Pali Lehohla and Dr Maureen Tong.
Although both the study leaders, Dr Mahlati and Prof Makhubela, have since died, the insights of this study call for a move from relief to sustainability through self-reliance enhancing approaches and highlights the Development Caravan/Zenzele approach of recruiting, training and employing Family Development Workers to enter identified indigent families with a basket of services, using a social worker approach, as a best practice.
This model not only professionalises and remunerates the unpaid work of women in family development, but also recognises that the family is the smallest unit of social sustainability.
The Chileans, who first exposed SAWID to this psycho-social, family-based model of eradicating poverties of identification, education, housing, health, family dynamics, employment and income, defined the family simply as two or more people who share a budget.
It is time to address our poverty alleviation and employment reality differently. While we can support the most immediate needs of the vulnerable and indigent, let us also take brave and bold decisions to make a decisive impact on the lived experiences of citizens.
Dr Criselda Kananda, is Acting Deputy Chair of the SAWID Trust.
