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Poverty and Headship in Post-apartheid South Africa, 1997–2006

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Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics and poverty status of female- and male-headed households in South Africa using nationally representative household survey data from the October Household Surveys (1997 and 1999) and the General Household Surveys (2004 and 2006). This decade (1997–2006) represents a period for which there is an extensive poverty literature documenting (particularly in the 2000 s) an overall decrease in the poverty headcount rate. At the same time, however, there is evidence to suggest that female-headed households have a far higher risk of poverty and that the poverty differential between female- and male-headed households widened over the period. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the main reasons that female-headed households are more vulnerable to poverty in post-apartheid South Africa and why poverty has decreased by more in male-headed households (relative to female-headed households). The study examines the key features which distinguish female- and male-headed households and whether these have changed over time. In order to link these characteristics with the poverty differential between female- and male-headed households, I then examine whether (and by how much) controlling for the observable differences between female- and male-headed households reduces the significantly greater risk of poverty in female-headed households.

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Notes

  1. The percentage of South African households that are female-headed, for example, increased from 35.2 % in 1997 to 37.5 % in 2006 (Posel and Rogan 2009).

  2. A degree of caution is required when making cross-country comparisons of poverty estimates. Differences in, inter alia, the respective poverty lines selected, data sources, measures of consumption (i.e. income or expenditure), and the unit of measurement (i.e. per capita or per adult equivalent income) complicate direct comparisons of poverty between different settings. The estimates present in Table 1 are merely demonstrating the magnitude of poverty differences between female- and male-headed households that are reported in the available literature.

  3. The Censuses and household surveys conducted during the apartheid era were not representative of all population groups in South African and are, therefore, not comparable with national household surveys conducted during the post-apartheid period. The first truly national representative household survey was conducted in 1993, but the 1997 OHS is the first survey that can be used to regularly estimate trends in income over time.

  4. Income measures were adjusted for inflation using Statistics South Africa’s consumer price index (yearly average) with 2000 as the base year.

  5. For a fuller discussion of the measure of income derived from the OHSs and GHSs as well as sensitivity tests on the poverty estimates, see Posel and Rogan (2012 ).

  6. In contrast, 62.4 % of male heads resided with a spouse or partner in 2006.

  7. Most male heads (in 2006) are either married (70.5 %) or have never married (23.6 %). Female heads, on the other hand, are fairly evenly represented across the marital categories with the highest percentage having never married (37.4 %) and with 22.5 % married and 32.3 % widowed (own calculations for the 2006 GHS).

  8. The narrowly (or strictly) defined unemployed are working-age individuals who wanted work and looked for employment in the reference period specified in the GHSs (e.g. over the past 4 weeks). The category of broadly unemployed then includes all of the narrow unemployed as well as those who wanted work but did not look for it during the specified recall period. These two categories of the unemployed are also often referred to as the ‘searching’ and ‘non-searching’ unemployed.

  9. These households are the most likely beneficiaries of remittances and other private transfers from outside of the household since the heads of these households have partners who are not listed on the household roster. While the OHSs and GHSs do not consistently capture information on remittances, there is evidence to suggest that reliance on remittances in decreasing. By 2006, only about 15 % of all female-headed households reported that remittances were the main income source in the household (Own calculations from the 2006 GHS).

  10. The growth in de jure female-headed households was driven predominantly by a substantial increase in the percentage of household heads who have never married (from 33.4 to 47.6 % between 1997 and 2006).

  11. The number of households (about 117/28,002) that report more than one head of household in the 2006 GHS is very small. These households have been dropped from the sample.

  12. An adjusted Wald test confirms that de facto female-headed households are more likely to be poor than de jure households and that co-resident female-headed households are less likely to be poor than both de facto and de jure households.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA) for their support in the completion of this study.

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  1. School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Campus, King George V Avenue, Durban, 4041, South Africa

    Michael Rogan

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Rogan, M. Poverty and Headship in Post-apartheid South Africa, 1997–2006. Soc Indic Res 113, 491–511 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0107-8

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