In his state of the nation address last Friday, President Thabo Mbeki referred on a number of occasions to poverty alleviation and reduction.
Poverty eradication, a "national war room" for a battle against poverty, and an anti-poverty strategy were central elements of the president's "apex priorities".
While national statistical agencies are not generally involved in poverty alleviation, they are at the heart of monitoring policies to address poverty and its consequences. To assess progress in reducing poverty, common definitions, sound methodologies and hard data are needed and this is where Statistics SA comes in.
Measuring poverty is not simple. It assumes a standard poverty definition. Stats SA has useful data for assessing changes in poverty, including two censuses and successive income and expenditure surveys, but these were not designed to measure poverty and poverty reduction.
While comparison of these data sets can provide some indicators of poverty, the uniform approaches to poverty measurement required for sound assessment are not present.
This is the background to Stats SA's Living Conditions Survey (LCS), a comprehensive poverty survey to address the multidimensional character of poverty. If successful, the LCS will change the current process of having to use data from a variety of sources in order to arrive at a poverty measure.
The LCS aims to collect data to describe poverty, inform poverty indicators, measure the extent and distribution of poverty and set up a framework as a basis for future poverty measurements.
Data will be collected from 30 000 households for a year through questionnaires and diaries, starting in September.
Gathering data to measure poverty is an advance over the use of separate data sets based on surveys designed to measure other phenomena. But this still begs the question of a baseline to identify poverty and measure progress in poverty reduction. The establishment of a "poverty line" will enable the government to measure and track progress in addressing monetary poverty.
In its simplest form, a poverty line consists of food and non-food requirements. The first element is arrived at by estimating the cost of a minimum basket of food to meet the daily energy needs of an average adult. This can be derived from reported consumption of food by South African households. The non-food component can be obtained from reported consumption of non-food items by South African households.
Poverty measures in these two areas are relatively straightforward and easy to understand and use. Design of the pilot poverty line is nearing completion and will be finalised once the latest consumer price index statistics are available.
However, it is more complex to construct a single index combining the many dimensions of poverty, such as health, education, life expectancy and basic needs.
Both approaches are required to measure progress in addressing poverty.
Stats SA will continue to develop statistically and theoretically sound measures of multidimensional poverty.
Pali Lehohla is South Africa's statistician-general and head of Statistics South Africa. For more information on Stats SA and its statistical output,, visit www.statssa.gov.za, or contact user services on (012) 310-8600.