The South African Index of Multiple Deprivation for Children

Please login to access download links.

Census 2001 The detrimental impact of poverty on child development, educational outcomes, job prospects, health, and behaviour is well known, and governments worldwide have committed themselves to eradicating child poverty as well as the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Yet more than 60% of South African children live in households with annual incomes below $1 360 (2006 value), and mortality and maltreatment rates remain high. In order to realise the rights of all children and tackle child poverty, robust measures must be developed to quantify the nature and extent of social deprivation experienced by children at the subnational level and thereby accurately identify the areas of greatest need and the most deprived areas. It is also essential that these measures focus specifically on children, separating children out from household-level data or data presented for the total population and foregrounding deprivation from a child's perspective. This report is the first attempt to generate data of this nature to map child deprivation at the municipal level in order to inform local-level policy and intervention in South Africa. Making use of information available from the 2001 Census about different aspects of deprivation, such as income, employment, education, health and living environment, the authors have combined these domains to form an overall index of multiple deprivations. The model emerges as a series of uni-dimensional domains of deprivation that can be combined, with appropriate weighting, into a single child-focused measure of multiple deprivations. This title is a valuable resource for policymakers, NGOs, scholars and other stakeholders monitoring the situation of children in South Africa.

Helen Barnes is a research officer in Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy, which is part of the Department of Social Policy and Social Work (SDRC) at the University of Oxford.

Gemma Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Oxford. She is Deputy Director of the Social Disadvantage Research Centre and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy, both of which are research centres within the Department.

Michael Noble is Professor of Social Policy, Director of the Centre for Analysis of South African Social Policy and Director of the Social Disadvantage Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

Professor Andrew Dawes is a former Research Director in the Child, Youth, Family & Social Development research programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). He is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town, and is an Associate Fellow of the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Oxford.