By Ntando Thukwana and Rivaldo Jantjies.
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South Africa, which is marred by one of the highest levels of inequality in the world, has made slow but steady progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 17 years.
Government data released on Thursday shows that expanded welfare programmes and improved access to education have helped lift millions of its citizens above basic living-standard thresholds.
As a result, the share of people in South Africa living below the lower-bound poverty line fell to 38% in 2023, or around 23 million people, from 58%, or 27 million people in 2006, Statistics South Africa said in the third edition of its Poverty Trends report.
“Poverty is declining in South Africa,” Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke told reporters in Pretoria.
He said a key reason for the shift was an increase in the country’s so-called social wage, including expanded grant programmes during the Covid-19 pandemic to shield the neediest.
The agency defines the lower-bound poverty line as R1 300 per month ($77).
Social protection is one of the government’s largest spending items and supports more than 28 million people, government data shows.
The Covid-19 distress grant, introduced at R350 a month to cushion the unemployed from the impacts of the pandemic, has been extended several times and will now run until March 2027.
Even so, progress lags government goals to eliminate poverty by 2030, in large part because of an unemployment rate of more than 30% which is one of the highest in the world.
Lifting job creation is a top goal of the nation’s coalition government, formed after the ANC lost its outright majority in elections last year as voters punished it for a decade of poor economic growth.
Regionally, the provinces of the Western Cape and Gauteng – the nation’s economic hub – continue to post the lowest poverty levels by headcount, though the latter recorded a slight increase between 2015 and 2023 and now accounts for almost a fifth of the country’s poor.
Extreme poverty also receded. The proportion of people living below the R777 per month food poverty line dropped to 17.6% in 2023 from 27.4% in 2006, leaving 10.8 million people classified as food-poor, 2.2 million fewer than in 2006.