A Look At South African Poverty!

South Africa can boast of a mixture of several races and cultures due to its historical background. Several different population groups with different languages, cultural backgrounds and origins all reside in South Africa. If one were to measure human development by established standards such as life expectancy, infant mortality and adult illiteracy, South Africa would compare unfavorably with many other middle-income countries of the world. These indicators also vary widely by race group, gender and geographical location within the country.

Poverty can perhaps be defined as the inability to attain a minimal standard of living, measured against basic consumption needs or the income which is required to satisfy them. It is conventional to use a poverty line in order to reflect the monetary value of consumption which separates the poor from the non-poor. In the case of South Africa this can be defined by considering the poorest 40% of households (about 19 million people or just fewer than 50% of the population) as poor.

The majority of these poor people reside in rural areas. In fact although 50% of the population of South Africa is rural, the rural areas contain 72% of those members of the total population who are poor. The poverty rate, which is the proportion of people in a particular group or area falling below the poverty line, which actually measures how widespread poverty is for rural areas is, 71%. The poverty gap was about R28 billion in 1995, and 76% of this was accounted for by the rural areas.

When considering South Africa's poverty it is necessary that prevailing accounting systems are investigated. In fact in many instances the national income of developing countries are not properly evaluated due to the fact that economic activity in these places takes place outside the recorded sector. Commonly dubbed as the informal sector, these activities are responsible for most economic activity in South Africa. Of course, it does not appear in the national income sheet because such transactions are unrecorded!

When considering South Africa's poverty relative to the rest of the continent or perhaps even the western nations, it is easy to devalue the culture of African people. Many times when examining South Africa's poverty people get caught up in the desolation of the nationals. It is important to recognize the output of its people in order to attempt to alleviate poverty for this nation.