Process of translating evidence into policy no easy task
ON JUNE 30 I released the results of the 2016 Community Survey. This constituted a 20year narrative of South Africa’s development path themed in the promise of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).
Just as a reminder, the RDP base document focused on five pillars. These were: meeting basic needs; developing human resources; building the economy; democratising the state; and implementing the RDP.
The narrative focused mainly on the first two RDP priorities of meeting basic needs and developing human resources.
The survey was released shortly before South Africa could make decisions on how they wished to further deepen the goal of democratising the state through the 2016 local government elections.
Reduced poverty
As regards meeting basic needs, evidence points to South Africa having rapidly reduced poverty through a cocktail of measures. In this regard we provided a multidimensional profile of how drivers of poverty in key dimensions of basic needs receded in the past 15 years.
The 15 years have been broken down into 10- and five-year periods. It is observed that head count poverty slowed down from 17 in a hundred in 2001 to 8 in a hundred by 2011.
Places like Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal made a dramatic journey from 60 in a hundred to about 25 in a hundred over the same period.
However, in the ensuing five years of 2011 to 2016, progress on this front had stagnated and could only move from 8 in a hundred in 2011 to 7 in a hundred by 2016.
The results highlighted that energy, water, sanitation, assets, school attendance and years of schooling were responsible for driving poverty down, thus making it possible for citizens to significantly realise the first goal of the RDP, namely meeting basic needs.
However, the results also showed a worrying trend for the 2011 to 2016 period. While between 2001 and 2011 the tide lifted all boats, in the five years of 2011 to 2016, the significant and increasing weight of unemployment as a driver of poverty soared to 52 percent compared with 33 percent 15 years ago.
Importantly in the phenomena that drive poverty, unemployment increased by 7 percentage points to 40 percent between 2001 and 2011 in a 10-year period, but accelerated by 12 percentage points to 52 percent between 2011 and 2016 in half of the 10-year period.
Unemployment together with years of schooling today constitute a 63 percent weight as drivers of poverty.
The figure in the graph shows differential contribution to drivers of poverty in South Africa across three time points, namely 2001, 2011 and 2016.
Herein lie the development challenge and the big puzzle of the role of evidence in policy.
The results of the 2016 Community Survey are reflected in the priorities of citizens, as well as the top three out of the 20 are, first, access to water; second, resolving levels of unemployment; and third, reducing the costs of electricity. Education or building our human resources features as priority number 15.
What was even more important in the build-up to the elections was that political parties resonated very much with citizen’s priorities in the Community Survey. A recent report by one of the media houses on the local government election campaign showed that education was not part of mainstream political messages.
The convergence of the observations of both the public and political parties played out against a recent public display of student riots on the #FeesMustFall campaign.
The point about education as represented by years of schooling combined with a young age structure derives a demographic dividend for nations.
The analysis of the 2016 Community Survey report shows that South Africa will not secure a demographic dividend. This makes South Africa’s development challenge a lot more precarious as it again misses out on the benefit of the second wave of youthful population. Also it has no potential of having a youthful population because fertility has dropped to very low levels of 2.43 and is heading towards replacement.
Human resources
Given these demographic facts, South Africa has to answer one of the RDP priority questions, namely building our human resources.
To this end, if society ranks human resources as priority 15 out of 20 and if key political moments, such as local government elections relegating education discourse to obscurity, how then will the policy processes catapult education to priority number two as evidenced by the data analysis on the drivers of poverty in South Africa?
If Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) are driven by priorities as expressed by public desires then education hardly features as an imperative.
The crucial question for society is: does advocacy for participation in higher education become the province of higher education students, just as it was a matter for the high school students in the 1976 Soweto uprisings forty years ago, or is it a matter for society as a whole?
The evidence before us suggests that the opinion of society and political parties is at variance with the data that places years of schooling as second priority after unemployment as a driver of poverty.
Society’s opinion is polarised between higher education students advocating free education as a priority and the section of society that desires water, employment and electricity as the topmost priorities.
Herein lies the impervious route of translating evidence into policy in a democratic state.