This article discusses the phenomenon of poverty, considerate of its impact on sustainable
development. This takes into account the fact that South Africa’s post-1994 dispensation recognized and
placed sustainable development at the core of its normative and institutional framework founded essentially to
safeguard sustainable livelihood for humanitarian gains. It is for this reason that socio-economic rights got
entrenched in the Constitution, 1996 and were afforded judicial enforceability. This constituted a strategy
through which judiciary would devise creative interventions, in cooperation with government, to effectively
mitigate adverse socio-economic effects of poverty among indigent communities. This article relied on South
Africa’s constitutionally entrenched transformative theory as a tool of analyses. It is asserted that as a socioeconomic
problem, poverty inhibits realization of basic human rights such as education and health care, which
are indispensable for sustainable development. Further that lack of employment opportunities owing to
sluggish economic growth compounds the problem even more thereby making poverty a pervasive challenge
to development at large.