5 August 2008
editorial
Johannesburg — THE government's war on poverty is to be launched in all provinces this month. But it sounds like it might, for now at least, be more of a skirmish than a full-on war.
A comprehensive antipoverty strategy has long been promised. The cabinet was shown a first draft at its January lekgotla, but sent it back to the drawing board.
President Thabo Mbeki also declared in his state of the nation address in February that one of the government's priorities was to establish an antipoverty war room. Mbeki said after the recent cabinet lekgotla that a "global strategy" to fight poverty was still being discussed and still needed wider consultation. However, the government will go ahead with the launch of its campaign against poverty this month by "reaching into individual households" to see what can be done to extricate these families from poverty.
It is still not clear what this will involve, and whether it is any different from standard welfare work. The campaign surely has the potential to make a difference to those families it targets, but it does not address the larger question of how the government will deliver on its commitment to halve poverty by 2014.
Indeed, there isn't even a definition yet of what poverty is. Work on a poverty line is incomplete and there is as yet no consensus on where the line should be set. And though drafts of the global antipoverty strategy are floating around, the detail of the strategy remains elusive.
The idea seems to be to pull together and "upscale" the government's existing antipoverty measures. Those include everything from early childhood development to public works projects, to rural development and the provision of basic services. These are important in fighting poverty. But putting them all together doesn't in itself amount to a strategy.
What's needed is a focused approach that identifies the chief causes of poverty and comes up with creative ways to target these. The new strategy, we hope, will achieve this, rather than become yet another fuzzy "to do" list.
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