This paper presents key findings from a livelihoods survey of households in four poor neighbourhoods in the Western Cape district of Ceres, one of the centres of South Africa's deciduous fruit export industry. It explores the nature and dynamics of the persistence of poverty in the context of...

This paper explores the challenge of understanding chronic and structural poverty in South Africa, and questions the dominance of the econometric imaginary in present-day development and poverty studies. It argues that measurement-based, econometric approaches to chronic poverty are dependent...

This paper describes the findings of case studies-based research on how poor and marginalized people in post-apartheid migrant networks seek to ameliorate poverty and manage their vulnerability. It argues that the ways in which people make decisions regarding formal social grants and cash...

This paper considers the dynamics of informal social protection in the context of chronic poverty and vulnerability in post-apartheid migrant networks. It argues that in poor and marginalized households in South Africa, the indirect impacts of social grants cannot be adequately understood by...

Ten years after liberation, the persistence of poverty is one of the most important and urgent questions facing South Africa. This paper reflects on some of the findings of research undertaken as part of the participation of the Programme on Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of...

Since 2003, South African policy discourse about persistent poverty has been dominated by the notion that poor people stay poor because they are trapped in a ‘second economy', disconnected from the mainstream ‘first world economy.' This paper considers the adequacy of this notion in the...