Flogging a dead horse: Attempts by van der Berg et al to measure changes in poverty and inequality

This paper seeks an explanation for the large differences in the extent and severity of poverty published respectively in van der Berg et al (2005: 2007a) and Meth (2006b). Headcounts in 2004 suggested by van der Berg et al (2007a) exceed by five million, those reported by (Meth, 2006b). Household survey respondents often under-report income (and expenditure). To address this, it is common (if not necessarily wise) to scale household survey income means until the grossed-up survey income totals are approximately the same as those yielded by the national accounts. The apparent reason for the differences between our respective poverty estimates lies in the poor quality of the income estimates in the surveys used by van der Berg et al as primary data source for estimating income distributions (by race). Scaling these survey estimates to make them consistent with the national accounts, it is argued, causes them to under-estimate the extent and severity of the poverty problem. As part of their analysis of changes in the welfare of Africans in South Africa since the advent of democracy (and in support of their claim that poverty has fallen), van der Berg et al attempt to measure changes in the racial shares of remuneration. The present paper ends with a brief examination of some of the problems of doing so using Statistics South Africa household surveys (the Labour Force Surveys) as primary data source. Welcomed by government because of the apparent progress they report in the fight against poverty, the possible consequences for anti-poverty policy (and for the poor) of the van der Berg et al figures being wrong are non-trivial.

Employer of Last Resort? South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP)

South Africa’s largest active labour market intervention (ALMP) is the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). Its first five-year phase has been completed and a second phase, more ambitious by far than its predecessor, has commenced. Critical analysis suggests that contrary to the hype, the programme has thus far made little lasting impact on the poverty and unemployment it is supposed to address. The analysis is in four parts: the first is an exploration of the background to the EPWP, in its role as South Africa’s largest active labour market policy; the second presents an examination of aspects of the performance of EPWP Phase 1, looking in particular at target vs. actual numbers of job opportunities and training days. This section also looks briefly at the EPWP’s proposed monitoring and evaluation (M&E) programme, before undertaking a more detailed consideration of the published information available on the training/employment nexus. The section ends with a glance at weaknesses in one of the surveys (the Labour Force Surveys, LFSs) put forward as data sources for evaluating the EPWP during Phase1; the third considers aspects of the vast increases in the scope of EPWP from Phase 1 to Phase 2, of the way in which these have been communicated, and of the way in which they are to be funded, while fourth the looks at the possible contribution that this second phase could/may make to the goal of halving unemployment by 2014. This part of the paper reproduces a set of scenarios produced by the National Treasury and published in the Budget Review 2010. These point to the extreme unlikelihood of the unemployment halving goal being attained. The paper ends with a set of recommendations, many relating to the production and distribution of knowledge about the EPWP.

How not to present poverty research results: The South African case

Because of their vital role in charting progress (or the lack thereof) in the pursuit of the povert y reduction, statistics are of obvious importance. In South Africa, these leave much to be desired.Disagreements among academics on the severity of poverty, the result of the failure of Statistics South Africa to conduct the appropriate surveys, are the inevitable result. Far from losing money (or sleep) as a result, some in the profession resort to further research, some of it quite highly paid, to squeeze new results out of old, often unreliable data. This could have serious consequences for the poor – policy failure caused by faulty monitoring can easily damage the vulnerable. Regardless of the reliability or otherwise of their findings, it is argued in the present paper that researchers would do well to offer them in a way that minimises the possibility of their being misinterpreted and/or misrepresented, and that maximises the likelihood that the non-specialist reader will be able to understand them. It is common practice to give poverty estimates in the form of the (FGT) ratios suggested by Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (1984), often without accompanying estimates of the absolute magnitudes involved. This, the present paper claims, allows overly optimistic conclusions to be drawn, making possible the concealment of rising misery behind a veil of aggregate improvement. Commencing with a glance in the abstract at the FGT ratios, the paper concludes that in order for poverty statistics not to convey a misleading impression of changes in the phenomenon they seek to represent, the ratios have to be augmented with sufficient information of concurrent changes in the income distribution. Most poverty studies look at changes in inequality. Often, however, the inequality results are not linked directly to the changes in poverty. As far as income poverty is concerned, the present piece of research suggests that doing so is the only appropriate way to present results. Having sketched a conceptual foundation, the paper looks at the regurgitation by government, without comment, of poverty statistics that directly contradict each other. After that, the strange case of an undeserved accolade government awards its anti-poverty policies, is found to be based upon a misinterpretation of their own findings by the authors of a recent poverty and inequality study (Bhorat and van der Westhuizen, 2008). A new set of poverty and inequality estimates (Leibbrandt et al, 2010), although it does not conform to the mode of presentation suggested above as necessary, points (as do the Bhorat and van der Westhuizen findings) to the strong likelihood that although the poverty headcount ratio may have fallen since the advent of democracy in the country, the poverty headcount is likely to have risen by several million between 1993 and 2008. An appendix at the end of the paper offers a little speculation on what poverty levels might have been had the AIDS epidemic not killed so many people.

‘I Don't Like My Children to Grow up in this Bad Area’: Parental Anxieties about Living in Informal Settlements

A growing body of research on informal settlements considers the experiences of children, but seldom outlines the daily parenting experiences of adult men and women. At the same time, policy on housing in South Africa points to the ways in which the ‘eradication’ of informal housing will help provide children with better futures. This article explores the social relation of parenting within an informal settlement in Durban, South Africa, bearing in mind the broader difficulties of parenting in poverty, and points to ways in which the material qualities of informal settlements contribute to feelings of anxiety in parents. It questions how these experiences might differ from or be similar to those of parents who live in generic contexts of poverty (but not necessarily informality). It concludes ultimately that living in an informal settlement does actually contribute to particular parental anxieties, but that there is no guarantee that informal housing eradication will remove these concerns

Assessing cloud development platforms - What Platform as a Service offers and what not

Cloud computing has rapidly become a computing paradigm of great interest to the research and practitioner community. In addition to the provisioning of cloud-based software services, a plethora of solutions for the development of these services in the cloud have emerged. Cloud-based development platforms, also known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) include a broad spectrum of elaborated application-level services. Architects and developers willing to exploit the advantages of this new technology for the software development process are confronted with a complex decision problem. Which PaaS characteristics are of specific importance for cloud-based development? What are major limitations negatively influencing the development process? In order to address these questions, we carried out a comprehensive case study. Nineteen developer groups comprising three master student developers each were asked to develop a cloud-based talent management software service. Each group was presented the same set of requirements, and randomly assigned one out of three pre-selected PaaS products. The groups were asked to record every development step during the four month project in a developer diary and also write a comprehensive project report. Within the developer diary as well as the final report particular topics had to be addressed, e.g. the time needed for the development of each requirement, helpful characteristics of the platform which supported efficient development of particular features, but also hindering characteristics or missing functionalities. The collected data was analyzed and a set of key characteristics for PaaS solutions was identified. Twelve functional and non-functional characteristics of PaaS solutions which were perceived as either helpful or hindering during the development project were extracted. For example, reusable platform objects were perceived as an important functional characteristic positively influencing the development process in the cloud. In contrast, limited DBMS functionalities were identified as a hindering characteristic by the developers. Our research is of specific relevance for practitioners dealing with development in the cloud; we provide guidelines for PaaS vendors and help architects and developers in the selection process for an appropriate PaaS solution

New housing/new crime? Changes in safety, governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond's Farm, eThekwini

New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in the global South, through an illustration of the limitations of efforts to produce ‘safe neighbourhoods’ in contexts of high unemployment alongside high levels of violence. The conceptual framing of ‘Southern Criminology’ (Carrington et al, 2015), centres the significance of histories of colonial and post-colonial violence, inequality, hybrid governance and justice practices, as well as informal living, and is employed to analyse recently housed residents’ experiences of crime and safety in South Africa, in a north eThekwini settlement, Hammond’s Farm. Recognising these ‘Southern’ factors, the paper argues that movement into new formal housing, is typified by significant material changes at the home and neighbourhood scale which foster privacy and safety, formalised governance practices and (partial) improvements in policing services. These occur in conjunction with access to new leisure activities including alcohol consumption and ‘township life’ which alongside ongoing poverty foster urban incivilities. A ‘Southern Criminology’ perspective frames concluding questions about the nature of crime in contexts of urban change, which are persistently shaped by inequality and wider historical and structural factors, challenging the state’s aspirations to achieve crime reduction through housing

Lived experiences of state housing in South Africa's cities: Johannesburg and Durban

A focus on the lived experiences of beneficiaries of South Africa's main housing programme reveals its diverse results, which challenge more straightforward readings of it in either largely positive or largely negative terms. Incorporating specific findings from previous studies in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, the paper explores a range of emotions, experiences and effects of the housing benefit across three dimensions: first, beneficiaries’ interactions with their housing; second, gendered experiences; and third, citizenship practices. Discussing different aspects of the lived experience of the housing sheds light on the effects of policy on people’s lives, helping to refine and distinguish multiple facets of an often unqualified and limited portrayal of the housing ‘beneficiary’. These complex, and at times conflicting, inscriptions, impressions and effects are read against particular socio-economic contexts. Outcomes reveal some sense of inclusion at the same time that wider patterns of inequality persist, to a large extent echoing Anand and Rademacher’s (2011) analyses of public housing initiatives in Mumbai

Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: Emerging issues and key questions

In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally, are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women (RSA 2014). Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership, and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessarily impact on men in terms of their power, resources and employment but in complex ways including positive and negative. The home remains significant for many men’s desires for authority and identity. Using the lens of masculinity, this paper considers the ways in which men are experiencing this housing intervention, revealing a complex mix of outcomes in terms of their sense of identity, their relationships and their financial pressures and income generation. It draws on empirical work in South Africa to illuminate the importance of focusing on men in relation to housing and offers key questions for future research

Lived experiences of state housing in South Africa's cities: Johannesburg and Durban

A focus on the lived experiences of beneficiaries of South Africa's main housing programme reveals its diverse results, which challenge more straightforward readings of it in either largely positive or largely negative terms. Incorporating specific findings from previous studies in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, the paper explores a range of emotions, experiences and effects of the housing benefit across three dimensions: first, beneficiaries’ interactions with their housing; second, gendered experiences; and third, citizenship practices. Discussing different aspects of the lived experience of the housing sheds light on the effects of policy on people’s lives, helping to refine and distinguish multiple facets of an often unqualified and limited portrayal of the housing ‘beneficiary’. These complex, and at times conflicting, inscriptions, impressions and effects are read against particular socio-economic contexts. Outcomes reveal some sense of inclusion at the same time that wider patterns of inequality persist, to a large extent echoing Anand and Rademacher’s (2011) analyses of public housing initiatives in Mumbai