Evidence-based policies drive progress
In the wake of the 70th United Nations General Assembly held in September this year, which saw the adoption of the new post2015 Sustainable Development Goals and marked the end of the Millennium Development Goals’ 15-year tenure, it is a time for South Africa to reflect on its own journey in achieving these goals, and determine what work lies ahead. We’ve had many wins, but two of the most fundamental and far-reaching challenges still remain: poverty and inequality.
Now i n its fifth democratic term, South Africa is on many levels a poster child for progress on Millennium Development Goal (MDGs), indicators such as poverty, HIV, housing, water and sanitation and gender equality.
But the country still faces immense challenges, as the National Development Plan 2030: Our Future — Make it Work report, released in 2012 by the National Planning Commission (NPC), starkly articulates: “Eighteen years i nto our democracy, South Africa remains a highly unequal society where too many people live in poverty and too few work. The quality of school education for most black learners is poor. The apartheid spatial divide continues to dominate the landscape. A large proportion of young people feel that the odds are stacked against them. And the legacy of apartheid continues to determine the life opportunities for the vast majority.”
Reducing poverty and inequality is at the heart of the National Development Plan (NDP), which states: “To make meaningful, rapid and sustained progress in reducing poverty and inequality over the next two decades, South Africa needs to fix the future, starting today.”
Dimensions of poverty and inequality in South Africa: 20 years on
According to 2011 estimates, South Africa has recorded a decline in poverty levels since 2006 as well as an improvement in poverty depth, which indicates that the income levels of the poor have increased.
These improvements indicate that the programmes and strategies implemented by government towards poverty alleviation have had a positive impact on those who are poorest.
The data also reflects the various successes of pro-poor elements of the country’s policies, as well as the need for further investigation and deliberate responses.
These positive trends were driven by a combination of factors ranging from income growth, decelerating inflationary pressure, and an expansion of credit, to social protection, including free primary health care, no-fee schools, social grants (most notably the old age pension and child support grant), RDP housing, and the provision of basic services to households such as water, electricity and sanitation.
But the battle is far from won. With levels of inequality increasing worldwide, including in South Africa, resulting in less social cohesion and more national, regional and global instability, it is crucial that South Africa explores more innovative policy interventions and improves current interventions in terms of reducing both poverty and inequality.
Published at the end of the last administration (2009-2014), the Presidency’s 20 Year Review emphasises this point, explaining that although the lives of millions of South Africans have improved due to new laws, better public services, expansion of economic opportunities and improved living conditions, pov- erty, inequality and unemployment continue to negatively affect the lives of many people.
Captured in government’s strategic plan for the 2014-2019 electoral term, the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) points out that “too few people have work, invest- ment is too slow and education lags behind our requirements. The weak state of the economy impedes our efforts to reach our development goals.
The second phase of our democratic transition calls for bold and decisive steps to place the economy on a qualitatively different path that eliminates poverty, creates jobs and sustainable livelihoods, and substantially reduces inequality. This requires radical economic transformation and a sustained focus on addressing the uneven quality of service delivery.”
Building a capable state
Where the NDP offers a long-term perspective on these challenges, the MTSF sets out the actions government will take and the targets to be achieved. As the first MTSF to follow the adoption of the NDP in September 2012, which brings greater coherence and continuity to the planning system, it is the first five-year building block towards the achievement of the vision and goals of the NDP.
It aims to ensure policy coherence, alignment and co-ordination across government, which, as Chapter 13 in the NDP on how to build a capable state demonstrates, cannot be done without building the capacity of the state: “A developmental state needs to be capable, but a capable state does not materialise by decree, nor can it be legislated or waved into existence by declarations. It has to be built, brick by brick, institution by institution, and sustained and rejuvenated over time. It requires leadership, sound policies, skilled managers and workers, clear lines of accountability, appropriate systems, and consistent and fair application of rules.”
The chapter identifies critical interventions needed to build a professional public service and a state capable of playing a transformative and developmental role in realising the vision for 2030, such as well-run and effectively co-ordinated state institutions staffed by skilled public servants. But how do we provide the support and training needed to build this capacity?
One such intervention aimed at doing just this is the Programme to Support Pro-poor Policy Development (PSPPD), a research and capacity-building programme borne out of the strategic partnership between South Africa and the European Union (EU). Located within the department of planning, monitoring and evaluation (DPME) in the Presidency, the PSPPD’s main premise is that to really address the twin challenges of poverty and inequality and truly impact on people’s lives, we need appropriate policy responses. And to formulate, reform and evaluate these policies, we need
appropriate evidence on which to base them.
This is a two-way street. Not only do policy-makers need good quality research so that they can make informed policy choices and improve the implementation of interventions, but so too do researchers need to understand the policy-making process to ensure their research evidence is relevant and presented in such a way that policy-makers can use it.
“Building the capacity of policymakers to analyse and use evidence is only one part of the story. Building the capacity of researchers to develop suitable and accessible evidence is equally important to effectively link it to real policy engagement,” explains PSPPD programme manager Mastoera Sadan. “Good quality research can help to uncover the extent of problems, and the underlying causes. This is important in deciding where to focus, as well as what interventions are needed to address the root causes.”
From research to reality
This process of systematically harnessing the best available evidence to inform policy-making, called evidence-based policy-making (EBPM), is internationally advocated for its potential to contribute to effective policy. Capacity-building interventions aimed at building both demand for, and supply of, evidence have emerged as crucial tools for the promotion of EBPM, with practitioners agreeing on the necessity to balance the dominance of supply-driven approaches with complementary activities to strengthen the capacity and motivation of policy-makers to understand and use research evidence for policy-making.
However, as Sadan points out, the reality is that the use of research in policy-making and implementation is also often a matter of timing. The current policy agenda, for example, is very focused on early childhood development (ECD). Research illustrates that access to quality ECD services and care in the early years of a child’s life has significant impact on future education, earnings, health and longevity. As a policy and programme priority, ECD is associated with a package of services aimed at enabling healthy development, which requires co-ordinated, collaborative efforts from multiple government departments.
Several PSPPD-funded research projects are exploring this area, such as the Centre for Early Childhood Development’s study, which aims to analyse, review and evaluate ECD programme options to influence policy changes so that children have greater access to quality ECD programmes, which will in turn reduce poverty and inequality. In terms of tangible outcomes, the project expects to deliver detailed ECD programme option guidelines, including the cost of each option, which can be implemented to effectively reach a relatively high number of children.
Another project, by the Project Preparation Trust, is investigating a new area-based approach for improved and up-scaled ECD services for the urban poor. Currently, most children within informal settlements are cared for within informal, unregistered ECD centres that generally provide insufficient stimulation and care by poorly trained caregivers.
Such centres are often not on the official “radar” of government, do not form part of the “system” and do not benefit from related support programmes; most of their children are therefore left highly vulnerable and disadvantaged.
This project will therefore initiate and rollout a new ECD support programme in eThekwini Municipality for informal, unregistered ECD centres to collect evidence for the acceptance and mainstreaming of a new standard of basic, acceptable but less formal ECD care which will receive state support and inclusion into the South African ECD system.
“Although the new policy will be going to Cabinet quite soon and these projects are only likely to be completed in 2016, given that this is a very challenging and complex issue, they will still be able to feed into the implementation plan,” says Sadan. “This demonstrates that EBPM is not always a linear process and that the uptake of evidence in informing policy depends largely on its relevance at that time.”
Building a body of policy-relevant research
Mindful of the multiple, intergenerational, and inextricable dimensions of poverty and inequality in South Africa, the PSPPD aims to build a body of scholarship that contributes to the understanding of the country’s situational reality, and shapes the policies and programmes designed to address it through funded projects such as these.
In order to produce this kind of policy-relevant research, the programme awards research grants to researchers within academic institutions. The grant awards are made on a competitive basis and importantly, because they are not commissioned projects, the beneficiaries of the grants retain intellectual property.
“However, when academics are awarded these grants, part of their proposal has to be a plan on how to engage policy-makers on their research questions and findings, as well as how to increase the number of junior researchers and students that work on their research projects, so that they too gain exposure and experience in working on policy-relevant projects and engaging with policymakers,” says Sadan.
The grants are awarded through two main mechanisms, the Calls for Proposals and Low Value Grants (LVGs), and the researchers are encouraged to make extensive use of the data from the DPME’s complementary panel study of income dynamics among South Africans, the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), to analyse their areas of interest. The most recent of these funded research projects are the LVGs, which, as the name suggests, are grants of a lower value, in this case not exceeding R110 000.
This process was launched i n November 2013, with the primary objective of building on and expanding the quantitative analysis skills of researchers by using the NIDS and South African Social Attitudes Survey data to address the overarching theme of “Improving the understanding of the dynamics of poverty and inequality”. The projects were divided into two sub-themes, social and economic, with six grants being awarded in March 2014 covering topics such as maternal and child migration, the dynamics of obesity and related risk factors, and youth labour market dynamics.
What shapes the dynamics of poverty and inequality in South Africa?
Research from these grant projects and others make a significant contribution to our understanding of changing social dynamics, such as the study exploring maternal and child migration in post-apartheid South Africa by Katharine Hall from the Children’s Institute of the University of Cape Town. In line with government’s priority of addressing child-related issues, this study examines how children are affected by adult migration, and whether or not they themselves move.
Much of the internal migration in South Africa remains associated with the historic and enforced fragmentation of families that took place under apartheid, but internal and oscillating labour migration remains an important livelihood strategy for many households, and extended and dual household forms endure.
Given the growing interest in understanding patterns of mobility in South Africa, detailed studies of internal migration patterns are surprisingly scarce. In particular, little is known about family migration, or the dynamics of child mobility and care in relation to adult migration. This study presents analysis of data from NIDS to describe patterns of child migration, and the ways in which these patterns relate to maternal migration from a policy perspective.
This is just one of many examples of the work the Children’s Institute has undertaken independently and in partnership with the PSPPD. The organisation has also participated in collaborations and networks with both government and civil society, as well as implementing some of the most important child-related projects in the country, including the Children Count report, an ongoing data and advocacy project aimed at monitoring the situation of children in South Africa by developing, tracking and presenting child-centred statistics to a wide range of audiences, and the South African Child Gauge 2015.
Unemployment, education: where are we?
High on the national agenda is the issue of unemployment, particularly among the youth. “South Africa must find ways to urgently reduce alarming levels of youth unemployment and to provide young people with broader opportunities,” reiterates the NDP.
“Unemployment is persistent amongst low skilled and less educated young people and those in economically depressed areas, as well as low skilled adults,” it reveals, pointing out that employment is the best form of social protection and that income support should be combined with active labour market policies as well as assistance and incentives that help people find employment. Social protection must provide unemployed people who are able to work with assistance that promotes employability and adaptability through various active labour market policies.
“Given this context, the need the detailed study and analysis the livelihoods of ordinary people in South Africa and how these changing assumes particular importance,” explain the researchers behind another of the LVG projects, once again demonstrating the issue of timing when it comes to policy-relevant research.
The study, entitled Reducing Poverty and Inequality: Actions promote sustainable livelihoods South Africa, by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), aims make an initial contribution towards fulfilling this need and investigates the ways in which South Africans sustain themselves in the face of increasingly complex marketplace and world. The research paid particular attention to the shocks that adversely affect households and corresponding coping strategies they employ.
The findings suggest that poverty continues to impact on the livelihoods of South Africans and that those identified as poor, unemployed, living rural areas, having low levels of education, and poor social networks particularly vulnerable. The study