President Jacob Zuma at the ANC's 100 year celebrations identified unemployment, poverty and inequality as the three greatest issues needing South Africa's attention. According to a BizCommunity press release he was also quoted as saying that "as we move into the future, we shall invest hugely in, and elevate the importance of theoretical and ideological work, as well as a scientific approach to analysing and solving society's problems." This is in essence what AfricaScope has done and will continue to do.

Members of Africascope have been creating statistics on unemployment, poverty and inequality since 1991. These statistics have been produced at a local municipality level initially from one census year to the next but since 2007 on an annual basis. What makes the work of AfricaScope more relevant is that the latest poverty statistics are based on the 2007 poverty line released by Statistics South Africa and the National Treasury in a document entitled "A national poverty line for South Africa".

What will also have to be incorporated into the mix is an understanding of where people are concentrated, the extent to which they are migrating from one area to another and what the economic activity is in an area. Spatial information at a local municipality level for two of these factors are being collected by AfricaScope and these are on population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates. These spatial datasets allows one to answer some key questions such as: "Where are the highest concentrations of people that are living in poverty?", "What economic activities are happening in these areas?" and "What is the level of unemployment by sector in these areas?". A further question that needs to asked is "How many people are migrating out of the area and where are they moving to?".

These are critical questions to enable the government to target priority areas, which they have been doing over at least the last 10 years, especially within the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development (ISRD) nodes. These interventions in the form of social grants, development programmes like the Expanded Public Works Programme and others have started to have a significant impact on poverty in some of the ISRD nodes, especially in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. In other provinces like KwaZulu-Natal, the ISRD nodes have not had the impact that they should have. This is attributed to ineffective allocation of financial resources to these impoverished areas.

The value of the work being done by AfricaScope is that it provide information to show the poverty, inequality and unemployment situations at a local municipality level over time. This shows where improvements in poverty are happening, as is reflected in the map below, and where poverty is becoming worse. A key factor is that the government must continue to keep their eye on changes happening within the population so that they have an early warning system that will enable them to implement approriate interventions when dramatic changes happen. One of these dramatic changes is the increase in poverty levels in many of the more urban local municipalities of the Western Cape, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.

For further information on this topic look out for a press release to be issued in the coming week.