Rming policy-makers and researchers over a decade
tives which transform the conventional relationship between policymaking and the use of social science evidence.
PSPPD I (2007 - 2012)
The overarching focus of Phase 1 of the PSPPD was on poverty and inequality. Through its grant-making process, the programme awarded 13 research projects to nine universities and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) to contribute to the body of evidence around child poverty, education, employment and livelihood strategies, health, and social cohesion.
The PSPPD also funded other smaller research projects and various training activities, study tours, and exchange programmes.
The programme hosted many conferences and workshops as well, including the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Policy Forum in June 2011, where the comparative study on inequality in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries was presented, and a workshop where conceptual work on child inequality was developed, forming the basis for South African Child Gauge 2012 of the Children’s Institute (UCT).
PSPPD II (2012 - 2017)
The second phase of the PSPPD leverages the knowledge and experience gained in Phase I to strengthen the use of EBPM and enhance implementation of the Medium Term Strategic Framework and National Development Plan, which aim to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030.
The Programme continues to facilitate the use of the National Income Dynamics Study datasets to expand the growing scholarship that uses empirical evidence, which in turn develops quantitative analysis skills, another outcome the PSPPD hopes to achieve.
It also continues to create a cohesive process between academic and government researchers embedded in the social and economic clusters. cancer and coronary artery disease. Another recipient of a LVG is Health Systems Trust, which is exploring obesity trends and risk factors in the South African adult population, in its Who is getting fat in South Africa? study.
“The prevalence of obesity and overweight globally is on the rise, and the trend is especially worrying in South Africa, where the proportion of people who are overweight and obese has increased remarkably in the last decades,” say the researchers. The study analysed trends in body mass index (BMI), prevalence of obesity, who is at higher risk of gaining weight, and what the risk factors are, such as tobacco use, alcohol consumption and level of physical activity.
Like obesity, HIV is another epidemic affecting all sections of our society. HIV counselling and testing (HCT) is a pivotal component of global HIV prevention and treatment efforts and this past decade has seen South Africa make considerable progress in increasing the proportion of individuals tested for HIV, especially with the launch of the world’s largest HCT campaign in 2010.
“While this is both impressive and unprecedented, it is unclear whether the campaign was able to reach individuals who had never tested before, as well as those with the highest risk of contracting HIV in their lifetime,” explain the recipients of the LVG study, which set out to find out whether, and to what extent, this national HIV testing campaign reached poor and atrisk individuals as well as previously untested populations. Given known racial, gender, and socioeconomic disparities in access and uptake of testing, the researchers, also from SALDRU, focused their analysis specifically on these populations.
Their results indicate that the country’s national HIV testing campaign did indeed yield substantial growth in the number of individuals testing for HIV for the first time. “Our estimates suggest that over a third of HIV tests conducted were for people who had never tested before. This is a significant achievement, and future initiatives to increase HCT uptake would gain from lessons learned from the South African effort,” say the researchers.
“Our findings also highlight some key areas where targeted interventions can help build on this success, such as better spatial matching of future HCT resources to areas with higher HIV risk burdens, revealed by geographic differences in testing rates, and the develop-
ment of interventions that specifically target less educated individuals, men, and younger populations.” The study reveals a persistence of gender and education-related inequities in HIV testing, despite the extraordinary effort aimed at testing all South Africans, suggesting that novel interventions may be required to achieve universal HCT access and uptake.
Remaining relevant
Preceding the Low Value Grants, the first Call for Proposals in the second phase of the Programme, which was launched in May 2013, illustrates the longevity of high-quality, relevant research. This grant-awarding mechanism invited research organisations, academic institutions and think tanks to apply for research funding under the theme “Working towards eliminating poverty and reducing inequality: addressing the implementation challenge”.
The research was expected to analyse, review and evaluate government’s policies and interventions around poverty and inequality. In the social sector, project topics included education, health, social cohesion, crime, developmental social welfare, and child poverty and inequality. In the economic sector, they included employment and unemployment, livelihood strategies, industrial and sector studies (agriculture, mining, services), as well as land reform and agriculture.
The Centre for Early Childhood Development and Project Preparation Trust studies around ECD were just two of these projects.
Likewise, the second Call for Proposals, launched in 2014 under the theme “Addressing the poverty and inequality challenge”, produced eight research grants, again covering themes across the social and economic sectors, ranging from childcentred studies looking at family contexts, child support grants, child wellbeing outcomes, and education, to job counselling, productivity signals, employment, and the development of small, medium and micro enterprises.
This research is still underway and, as with all the PSPPD research projects, is extremely topical in the context of South Africa’s current issues, such as the study by the University of the Witwatersrand led by Professor Linda Richter, which aims to provide longitudinal perspectives on violence in the lives of children. While violence against children is pervasive and widespread, it is largely undocumented and inadequately researched. As a consequence, it is frequently treated as a marginal social issue attributed to the violent predisposition of isolated individuals. We know that violence against children causes significant personal suffering and long-term ill-health, poor psychological adjustment, and a range of social difficulties, including adverse effects intergenerationally, but this study seeks to quantify the exposure to risk factors for and expressions of violence towards South African children over the timespan of childhood through an analysis of data from NIDS as well as the landmark Birth to Twenty Plus (Bt20+) study.
The PSPPD-funded research, together with the complementary NIDS, plays a central role in providing a more comprehensive, qualitatively- and quantitatively-informed evidence base for policy decision makers and critical role players within the policy framework. For example, in 2009 in phase one of the Programme, along with producing a series of policy briefs and funding a number of smaller research projects, the PSPPD issued a Call for Proposals under the theme “Eradicating poverty and inequality: Towards welltargeted programmes that strengthen the impact of public policy, harness human capability and promote self-sufficiency”, through which 13 research projects were awarded to nine universities and the HSRC.
The grant topics were divided into five themes — child poverty, education, employment and livelihood strategies, health, and social cohesion — and many of these projects were used extensively in policy debate and development, such as the “Low quality education as a poverty trap in South Africa” study, led by Professor Servaas van der Berg from the Department of Economics at the University of Stellenbosch. The central question underlying this research was whether the quality of education in South Africa is so low that it serves to trap children from poor communities in an ongoing cycle of poverty.
But in order for this evidence to be used effectively, no matter how relevant, better dialogue, partnerships, and collaboration across the academic and policy-making fields is needed. It is widely acknowledged on both sides that, while there has been a significant improvement in recent years, some misalignment does still exist between policy-makers and academic researchers. This results in low uptake of research in policy development and implementation, and research that is not relevant to government’s priorities.
Bridging the academic and policy-making worlds
a change in outcome.
Furthermore, research has revealed that linked events, designed to bridge the divide between researchers and policy-makers, contribute to influencing perceptions and breaking stereotypes that researchers and policy-makers have about each other, as well as enhancing knowledge and skills of policymakers, and influencing research priorities.
Engagement does not only need to happen between the academic and policy-making worlds, but within them as well. Rarely, if ever, are issues the domain of a single government department or a specific sector. Rather, interventions require the input of multiple stakeholders, from within and outside of government. Likewise, not just one piece of research will inform a policy; a range of evidence will be used and for this reason, it is equally important for researchers to network and collaborate with each other as well.
One of the PSPPD’s main vehicles for these linked events has been the hosting of workshops aimed at providing a platform for engagement among researchers from various academic and research institutions as well as government departments.
Joint learning opportunities like these facilitate greater critical engagement and reflection, allowing participants to more readily interact with the information and also engage in honest discussion as to the relevance and implications of the information to social and economic policy challenges. They are also instrumental in improving the relationship between policy-makers and researchers.
These capacity-building and training components of the PSPPD are implemented by the Programme’s Learning Facility, established in 2014 to assist in achieving its aim of transforming accumulated knowledge around pro-poor policy and projects into a state capability. The Learning Facility provides knowledge solutions to increase research uptake and support the development of policies that are responsive to the realities of poverty and inequality in South Africa, as well as fund research that integrates the impacts of current policies. It also looks at how to build platforms for critical engagement and alignment with the NDP, as well as for the support of institutionalising the linkage between research, monitoring and evaluation, and policy-making. Central to the work of the Learning Facility is enabling the PSPPD to serve effectively as a national-level institution that fosters linkage and exchange across an evidence-based policy-making system.
Through these capacity building activities and research grants, the PSPPD aims to be an exemplar learning institution, empowering policy-makers to employ better methods to make use of different kinds of knowledge, and improving systems to ensure researchers make the right knowledge available to decision-makers timeously. In so doing, the programme hopes to achieve its ultimate overall objective of improving the living conditions of South Africans by halving poverty and unemployment, in line with the Millennium Development Goals in the last 15 years, and the Sustainable Development Goals in the next 15.