In late 1993, South Africa’s first nationally representative household income and
living standards survey was undertaken. Analysis of data from that survey indicates that
perhaps half of all black South Africans lived in poverty in 1993, a stunning portrayal of
material deprivation, inequality, and human insecurity found in the midst of a an upper
middle income country with a per-capita income in excess of $3000. A recently
completed report for the South African Inter-Ministerial Committee on Poverty and
Inequality (May, et al., 1998) calculates the UNDP’s Human Development Index for
specific South African ethnic and regional groupings in 1992, and finds that the HDI for
“African” population of South Africa ranks between that for Swaiziland and Lesotho,
while the HDI for Whites is between that of Italy and Israel.
The legacy of apartheid had of course much to do with these observed levels of
poverty and inequality. Apartheid was a process of active dispossession that
simultaneously denied people the opportunity to develop new assets by restricting access
to markets, infrastructure and education. In earlier analysis of rural livelihoods based on
the 1993 data, Carter and May (1999) conceptualize poverty as the outcome of two
forces: the assets (or entitlements) that households have; and, the constraints that limit the
returns attained from those assets. Foreshadowing the analysis in this paper, Carter and
May also try to identify the asset basis of poverty, meaning those asset combinations that
map into an expected livelihood below an income poverty line given the severity of the
“non-separabilites” that constrain asset use