OP-ED: Towards a systemic approach for eradicating poverty and inequality By Crain Soudien
The complexity of poverty and inequality in South Africa and the multiple factors behind it, across a range of structural and psychosocial dimensions of the social experience, require that we develop explanations which account for its durability and persistence. These explanations must make clear, firstly, the multiple facets and interrelationships of poverty and inequality, and, secondly, how, in their reach into the everyday experience of South Africans, they work.
There are however distinctive factors and dynamics surrounding the forms of poverty and inequality that have historically developed and continue to manifest themselves that make the South African situation unique. While there is an awareness of this distinctiveness, it is important to begin to understand firstly, the nature and character of South African poverty and inequality, secondly the causal and constitutive elements behind them, and thirdly, why they are so durable as social phenomena.
This work has been brought together well by Leibbrandt, Woolard, Finn and Argent in a briefing paper developed for the OECD, and in a summary of the state of the discussion by Wilson and Cornell . As Wilson and Cornell say, the figures make four points clear about contemporary South Africa: The awareness in the South African discussion of the multifactorial nature of poverty and inequality is also part of the approach of the Mandela Initiative , a major national movement aimed at bringing the political, economic, scholarly and civil society communities together around a process aimed at reducing poverty and inequality in South Africa. Evident in the MI is an understanding of the connectedness and interdependence of the economic, social, cultural and psychological.
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