Ms Katharine Hall, Children’s Institute, UCT
It is important to distinguish poverty rates for children across a range of dimensions partly because the child population is differ-ently distributed to the adult population. Many of the deprivations for children become lost in the generalised analyses of household surveys. Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of dep-rivations in childhood, which has long-lasting affects. It is therefore important to interrupt the cycles of poverty from the early years.
There is a case for continuous monitoring of single measurements of deprivation alongside multiple or composite indices so that those could be explored over time. A project of the Children’s Institute, called Children Count, monitors trends across a range of depriva-tions for over ten years focusing on demography, care, income poverty, social grants, living conditions, nutrition and hunger, HIV and health, education and early childhood development. The work delves into some of the disaggregations and looks at interac-tions revealing patterns over time.
The work started with a clear rationale for selecting indicators by using a rights-based framework and a range of sources was referred to in defining the specific indicators.
All the definitions were able to articulate with policy promises,
‘entitlements’ and norms and standards and there was consultation with a reference group and experts, as well as reference to literature.
Data availability issues were taken into consideration. One of the main sources of data was the General Household Survey.
In terms of the distribution curve of inequality in South Africa, the unequal distributions are national and the distinctions (spatial, racial, gender and intergenerational dynamics) in the distributions are all of particular relevance to children. Over 40% of children come from the poorest 20% of households. In terms of household structure and clustering, mixed-generation households (with children) are on average larger than adult-only households and 50% of households are mixed-generation households. Child poverty rates are far higher than adult poverty rates. There are numerous measures not subject to equivalent scales that illustrate how deprivations for children are much more pronounced because they live in larger households. As children are disproportionately rural in South Africa, they are over-represented in terms of inadequate housing with poor services and in unemployed households, contributing to higher poverty levels for children. There have been some changes in urban-rural transitions over time, but the child rate still lags behind that of the adult rate of urbanisation.
Household and family contexts and special arrangements are very important. These relate to shifts in the rural-urban economy, declining remittances to households, declining marriage rates and paternal support to children, women increasingly bearing economic, household and child-care responsibilities, impacts of migration, and the fact that large (and increasing) numbers of children do not have co-resident parents, resulting in a burden of care and financial support on the elderly. The burden of care for children with no parents and those without resident fathers is primarily in the poorest households. The living environment deprivations reveal that children’s access to water, sanitation and electricity is far poorer than that of adults.
In urban settlements, children face different risks encapsulated in a rage of deprivations. For example, of the children under the age of six who live in informal settlements in urban areas, over 50% live
in overcrowded conditions; an important factor in terms of child health, safety and abuse. A positive trend is seen in the massive increase in the number of five to six-year olds with institutional access to early learning. The majority of children in the low socio-economic status group only have basic or low reading skills by Grade Six. Inequalities in education means that children who are better off progress quicker and have better outcomes. Huge inequalities across the income quintiles in terms of young people aged between 15 and 24 who are not in employment, education or training, have not reduced over time.
Trends in income poverty show declining child poverty rates when measured by income poverty headcount, depth and severity.
Income poverty reduction (across all race groups and provinces of South Africa) is driven more by social grants than by changes in employment, noting that the child support grant (CSG) is not sufficient to bring a child out of poverty in the absence of other labour market income. Reduction in poverty is not paralleled by reduction of children in unemployed households, although there are declines in both.
A range of options was presented for scaling-up the CSG in light of established human development benefits, such as:
• Increasing the amount.
• Universalising and thereby getting around the areas of exclusion.
• Extending to older children/youth.
• Extending to pre-birth (pregnant women).
• Using the CSG mechanism rather than the foster care system to get social assistance to orphans living with kin.
Work that remains to be done includes bringing in all the available evidence, doing new research where there were gaps, looking closely at the options for scaling-up the CSG and doing the relevant budget work, engaging with researchers, civil society groups and policymakers to examine relative merits and trade-offs.