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Cape Town - The Western Cape and Gauteng are the only two provinces in South Africa where more than two-thirds of households earn salaries as their main sources of income. In the rest of the country, households rely significantly on grants to get by.
This is according to the 2015 General Household Survey, an annual report that measures the progress of development in South Africa. The results were presented by statistician general Pali Lehohla in Pretoria on Thursday.
According to the report, social grants have an “overwhelmingly positive impact” on poverty reduction. “They dominate the income profile of many poor households and play a vital role in sustaining lives and livelihoods for households that have no employed members,” the report said.
The highest number of households that survive on grants are found in the Eastern Cape at 38%, followed by Limpopo province at 33%. In contrast, only 10% of Gauteng residents and 12% of Western Cape households rely on grants as a monthly income.
The annual household survey looks at South Africans’ access to education, housing, services and facilities, as well as food security and agriculture. For the purposes of the survey fieldwork was done among 21 601 households conveying information about 74 449 individuals.
According to the survey, 26.2% of children between the ages of seven and 15 years are not attending any educational institutions, while 6% of children are not undergoing education at age 15. A quarter of premature school leavers cited lack of funds for not studying.
Worryingly, access to textbooks was much more constrained in 2015 and only 74.9% of learners had access to textbooks in all their subjects in the first quarter last year.
The National Development Plan envisages that all informal settlements should be upgraded on suitable land by 2030. However, between 2002 and 2015 the number of South Africans living in informal dwellings increased from 13.6% to 14.1%.
North West province has the highest percentage of households that live in informal dwellings, followed by Gauteng at 21%, with the Western Cape in third place at 17%. “Migration plays an important role in the prevalence of households living in informal settlements,” the report said. Gauteng accounts for 42% of internal migrants and over 52% of international migrants.
Food security continues to be a problem in a number of provinces in South Africa. The situation was particularly serious in North West province where 39% of households didn’t have adequate access to food.
“Household vulnerability to hunger has declined, relative to 2002,” the report said, “but has largely stabilised, if not increased slightly since 2011.”
