Despite significant methodological advances, much program evaluation and monitoring data are of limited utility because of an over-reliance on quantitative methods alone. While surveys provide generalizable findings on what outcomes or impacts have or have not occurred, qualitative methods are...

Social capital has been identified as an important avenue of upward mobility for poorer people. However, recent theoretical work suggests that in highly polarized societies, the accumulation of social capital is likely to be fragmented and ineffective for people at the bottom of the economic...

Recent theoretical work hypothesises that a polarised society like South Africa will suffer a legacy of ineffective social capital and blocked pathways of upward mobility that leaves large numbers of people trapped in poverty. To explore these ideas, this paper employs a mix of quantitative and...