Re-examining the Multidimensional Poverty Index of South Africa

The persistently high level of poverty remains one of the main socio-economic issues in South Africa since the democratic transition in 1994. Many South Africa studies focused on using money-metric measures to examine poverty levels and rates, but in recent years there has been an emergence of studies that examined multidimensional non-money-metric poverty. Nonetheless, some poverty indicators are still ignored. Thus, this study re-examined the extent of multidimensional poverty in South Africa with the derivation of a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by considering the various overlooked indicators. Upon analysing Statistics South Africa’s 2018 General Household Survey data, the empirical findings indicated that deprivation was most profound for African females living in rural areas in Eastern Cape and Limpopo, in households headed by those who were not employed. Deprivation was also the highest in the transport assets, sanitation type, refuse removal frequency, water and receipt of post/mail indicators. With regard to poverty decomposition by dimension, the top three dimensions representing the greatest share of MPI poverty were access to services and facilities (31%), asset ownership (22%) and dwelling (17%), with the isolation dimension following closely (15%). Lastly, the indicators which contributed most to MPI poverty were transport assets, sanitation type, refuse removal frequency and water source.