Poverty and underdevelopment for children and people in South Africa today

Introduction

Development deals with the alleviation (or the eradication) of poverty. Poverty is inter-related to other problems of underdevelopment. In rural and urban communities, poverty can be very different. In urban areas people often have access to health and education but many of the problems caused by poverty are made worse by things like overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, pollution, unsafe houses etc. In rural areas there is often poor access to education, health and many other services but people usually live in healthier and safer environments. (Andrews, 2008)

Poverty and underdevelopment for children and people in South Africa today

Since the alleviation of poverty is the most important aim of development work, we have to understand how to measure poverty. Development means that there has been some improvement and improvements must be measurable. One of the most common ways of measuring poverty is to set a monthly average on which a family can survive - this is called the poverty line. If a family has an average income below this amount, the household and its members are said to be living in poverty. The poverty line is an amount that changes according to the size of the household, its age and composition. (Andrews, 2008)

Another way of measuring poverty is by measuring the poverty gap. The poverty gap shows how far a household falls below the poverty line, so in other words it shows the depth of, or degree of poverty. In some provinces many people may be below the poverty line but they may be just a little bit below it. In other provinces fewer people could be below the poverty line but they could be far below it. These two types of poverty distribution in your population obviously need a different response.

The weakness of these measures is that they only measure income and not any other state support or assets that families can use. For example in South Africa the poverty line in 2003 was about R1100 per average family per month in income. While a huge part of the population has less "income" than R1100 per month, the government also provided free or subsidised electricity, water, schooling, (Andrews, 2008) health care and housing to many poor people. These are things that they would otherwise have had to pay for out of their limited income. All the free or subsidised services also equals about R1100 per household per month.

South Africa has a small wealthy population and medium sized middle income and poor populations. The differences between the wealthy and the poor are very big and in some ways we have the developed world and the developing world living side by side in one country. (Bayat, 2004)

Some facts about South Africa are:

* Around half the population is defined as poor and living below the poverty line.

* Poverty is mainly rural- about two thirds of the country's poor people live in rural areas and more than two thirds of rural people are ...