![]() ![]() These are the food poverty line (set at R531 per person per month in April 2017), the lower-bound poverty line ( R758) and the upper-bound poverty line ( R1,138).Īnother picture can be painted when we look beyond income to the other ways people experience poverty. Income is used for the three national poverty lines developed in South Africa. If a person lives on less than a certain threshold income they are considered to be living in poverty. Poverty is easy to see, but less easy to define – or to measure across a city, a province or a country. Alex lies on the border of the wealthy suburb of Sandton, said to be the richest square mile in Africa. Children play and adults work in Alexandra township, one of the poorest areas in Gauteng. That sucked the potential for growth out of the economy. The apartheid planners purposefully built a system that prevented black South Africans from earning, prospering and contributing to the wealth of the country. The only electorate the government had to please was white people. But South Africa under apartheid was not a democracy. But for more than 40 years, apartheid squandered this potential.Ī government policy designed to keep most of its people poor seems, and is, absurd. It made South Africa poorer than it should have been. Instead, it excluded the majority of the people from any meaningful participation in the economy. Apartheid was a crude attempt at social engineering designed to make black South Africans a cheap and plentiful source of labour. The reason so many South Africans live in poverty, in a middle-income country, is apartheid. The numbers are calculated from the population, poverty headcount and average household size of each municipality. Map of South Africa showing estimated numbers of people living in poverty.
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