The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and
2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of
this goal has not yet been defined. This article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by
2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty headcount ratio, using income and
expenditure survey microdata. With the poverty line as defined here, approximately half the South
African population falls below the poverty line. Despite this, the aggregate poverty gap is surprisingly
small at about 3% of GDP. Projections of poverty in 2014 under various growth scenarios indicate that
growth alone will be insufficient to halve poverty by then, and that any worsening of distribution will put
the target of halving poverty by 2014 far beyond reach. However, projections of the effects of a range of
growth and distributional scenarios on poverty, using a new method for simulating pro-poor
distributional change, indicate that halving poverty appears feasible with moderate growth rates and
fairly mild pro-poor distributional change. The results are indicative as to the scale of distributional
changes necessary to halve poverty under various growth scenarios.