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A Geographical Profile of Child Deprivation in South Africa

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Abstract

This article describes the methodology employed to create an index of multiple deprivation for children in South Africa at small-area level and presents the picture of deprivation across the country exposed by the index. Making use of information from the 2001 Census, 14 child-focused indicators were arranged into five domains of deprivation—income, employment, education, living environment and adequate care—which were then combined with equal weights to form an overall index of multiple deprivation at municipality level. The patterns of deprivation across South Africa within each domain and on the overall index are examined at national, provincial and municipal level. The article ends with a discussion of some of the strengths and weaknesses of the index and suggestions for future work in this area.

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Notes

  1. And also the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (Organisation of African Unity 1999) in 1999.

  2. The grant is a monthly payment to the primary caregiver of the child (in the case of the child support grant), foster parent (in the case of the foster child grant) or parent/guardian/foster parent (in the case of the care dependency grant).

  3. The proportion of the eligible population (children in the case of the CSG) who actually receive the grant.

  4. Municipalities are the spatial units below the nine provinces. There are 262 municipalities in South Africa, of which 231 are local municipalities, 25 are District Management Areas and six are metropolitan municipalities. There are eight local municipalities and one metropolitan municipality which straddle province boundaries (Statistics South Africa 2004).

  5. See Barnes et al. (2007b) for a full report of the study.

  6. A 10% sample of the 2001 Census is publicly available and robust at municipality level, but not below that (e.g. ward or enumeration area). It was not possible to obtain the necessary permissions to produce the SAIMDC below municipality level using the full Census, but this is recommended for future work, as discussed in the final section of this article.

  7. The data are at individual level and so it is possible to count a child as deprived if she experienced more than one form of deprivation in a particular domain. However, a specific child was only counted once for each domain, even if she experienced more than one form of deprivation within that domain.

  8. It is not possible to report standard errors for a composite index (although work is currently being undertaken by the Office for National Statistics in the UK to test the validity of standard errors in a composite index; they are yet to report however). In this type of work, shrinkage estimation (i.e. empirical Bayesian estimation) has been used to deal with large standard errors on domain scores. In this instance, shrinkage made little difference to the overall ranking of municipalities on each domain as standard errors were small.

  9. The Census metadata defines a household as a group of persons who live together and provide themselves jointly with food and/or other essentials of living, or a single person who lives alone.

  10. Reasons for children being behind in school include starting school late or being made to repeat a year for not reaching the necessary standard to progress to the next grade. The latter could be because of the quality of the education received, missing school through illness, or missing school for other reasons such as being unable to afford to pay for fees and uniform.

  11. The Canadian National Occupancy Standard was applied. This measures the bedroom requirements of a household by specifying that: there should be no more than two people per bedroom; children less than five years of age of different sexes may reasonably share a bedroom; children 5 years and over of the opposite sex should not share a bedroom; children less than 18 years of age and of the same sex may reasonably share a bedroom; and household members 18 years and over should have a separate bedroom, as should parents or couples.

  12. A child-headed household is a household where a person under the age of 18 is designated as the household head on the Census questionnaire in place of an adult, and where there are no other adults in the household.

  13. District Management Areas (DMAs) - areas such as game reserves and mining complexes with small populations and special characteristics that produce anomalous results and are customarily excluded from small area analyses - and one municipality with a child population of less than 1,000 were omitted. The final number of municipalities included in the SAIMDC was 245 (municipalities that straddle provinces were counted as two separate municipalities each time).

  14. The most deprived 25% of municipalities in this instance.

  15. The results presented in this section refer to 2001.

  16. Areas left white are DMAs that were excluded.

  17. The province to the south-west of the country containing Cape Town (labelled on the map).

  18. The small (in size) province towards the north-east of the country containing Johannesburg and Tshwane (Pretoria) (both are labelled on the map).

  19. During apartheid, ten bantustans or homelands were created in South Africa and many black African people were resettled in these territories. Four of these, including the Transkei and Ciskei in the now Eastern Cape, were independent.

  20. The others are Cape Town, Ethekwini (Durban), Ekurhuleni (East Rand), Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela (Port Elizabeth) and Tshwane (Pretoria - split between Gauteng and North West provinces).

  21. See Barnes et al. (2007a) for a review of currently available administrative data sources.

  22. Although, as noted above, municipalities with less than 1,000 children were excluded.

  23. The index was produced using the full Census rather than the 10% sample and so could be presented at ward level.

  24. For more information please visit the following websites:

    England and Wales - http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/soa.asp

    Northern Ireland - http://www.nisra.gov.uk/aboutus/default.asp90.htm

    Scotland - http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/02/18917/33243

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of Save the Children Sweden, who funded the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Helen Barnes, Michael Noble, Gemma Wright & Andrew Dawes

  2. University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa

    Michael Noble

  3. Psychology Department, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Andrew Dawes

  4. Child Youth Family and Social Development, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa

    Andrew Dawes

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  1. Helen Barnes
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  2. Michael Noble
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  4. Andrew Dawes
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Correspondence to Helen Barnes.

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Barnes, H., Noble, M., Wright, G. et al. A Geographical Profile of Child Deprivation in South Africa. Child Ind Res 2, 181–199 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-008-9026-2

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