South Africa spends a huge R680 billion a year to tackle child poverty, but 13 million children live below the poverty line, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund reports.
The fund’s statistics showed South Africa’s “slow progress in alleviating child poverty,” Business Day said. It quoted the details provided by the fund of spending by the public and private sectors, and said the fund intended to encourage dialogue on how to get better results for the money being spent.
“The manner in which resources are being deployed isn’t effective. The question is how do we spend differently so government gets bang for its buck?” said Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund CEO Linda Ncube-Nkomo.
South Africa’s spending on measures to tackle child poverty is high by international standards.
South Africa spends 9.8% of GDP on programmes that support children living in poverty, compared to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of between 3% and 3.5% of GDP, the fund reported.
Government expenditure accounts for R656bn of South Africa’s total spending on poverty alleviation efforts for children, including education, healthcare, free school meals and welfare grants, according to the report. The private sector spends an estimated R831m a year on tackling child poverty, while nongovernmental organisations spend between R2bn and R21bn per annum, it found.
This means about R4,350 a month is directed to children living in poverty.
More had to be done to improve child nutrition, Ncube-Nkomo said. She suggested extending the child support grant to include pregnant women to ensure children were well nourished from conception onwards.
The fund put the indirect economic costs of child poverty in South Africa at an estimated R1.3-trillion a year, or 17.8% of GDP. This includes the costs to the economy of the higher risk of unemployment and lower earnings potential of adults who grew up in poverty, and of the additional amount spent on public services to help address the damage done to children growing up in these conditions.
Business Day said the report also highlighted the impact of violence on children, finding that they were more susceptible to violence if they grew up in poverty.
Image: The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and Deloitte Africa launched a child poverty study. Courtesy of @NMCF_SA
