Measuring poverty - statistics and indicators
Figures and statistics have a very important role to play in development. If development is about alleviating or eradicating poverty, every government has to be able to measure whether their policies are making changes to poverty. Every five years the government conducts a census where thousands of officials go from door to door and interview all households about things like age of household members, income, education, access to water and sanitation, number of people in the family etc.
The collection of this kind of data is at the heart of development studies. Every government has to understand its population - this is called demography which is the statistical study of human population.
Government is responsible for spending the money that is collected through taxes on improving the lives and providing basic services to its citizens. Every ministry and government department needs statistics to be able to do this. For example, the minister of finance needs to draw up a budget every year based on projected income and expenditure. To do so s/he needs to know things like: how many people are working and form part of the taxable population, how many people live below the poverty line and how many qualify for social grants such as pensions, child grants, disability grants etc.
The minister of education has to know how many children there are of school-going age and how many of these will stay in school until matric, how many of these children are in rural and urban areas and how many of these children have special education needs. The minister of health has to understand the number of women who are of child bearing age and the average number of children that they have, this will help to plan for the future provision of health care to the population as a whole and will help to plan anti-natal clinics, nutritional services etc.
All ministries must know what percentage of the population live in rural and urban areas so that services such as water, electricity provision, the planning of roads, public works programs and so on can be correctly targeted. The government as a whole needs to put in place certain indicators to measure whether there are any improvements in people's lives. For example some indicators could be:
Income per family;
Type of household people live in;
Access to running water and electricity;
The age at which the average person dies or mortality rate;
The number of children people have.
It is very important that the census uses consistent statistics and indicators so that comparisons can be made and improvements measured. Every census should ask more or less the same questions so that we can compare changes over five-year periods. For example the 2001 census showed very clearly that Gauteng and the Western Cape had a large growth or increase in population as more and more people became urbanised. People left the Eastern Cape to move to the Western Cape and moved from Limpopo and North West to Gauteng.
This population shift has an impact on service delivery and the housing situation in those provinces where there has been a big growth in informal settlements. For example the informal settlements put additional pressure on local municipalities to provide basic services and to develop new housing settlements.
In the next section we will look at some of the most important indicators or measures that are used to understand poverty and underdevelopment and to measure the level of well being and development that people experience.
Poverty measures
Some of the key poverty measures that are used are:
Population growth
Population structure
Fertility
Infant mortality and Life expectancy
Per capita income
In this section we will look at each of these in more detail