| The aims
of the Chair are in three interrelated areas of applied poverty reduction
assessment: the ongoing improvement of the indicators that are used to reflect
change; the analysis of the impact of poverty reducing interventions; and
investigating wider dynamics that offset or contribute towards desired policy
goals. During
2011, assistance was provided to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) in the
development, implementation and analysis of a new national data series, the
Living Conditions Survey (LCS) that was undertaken in 2009. This survey
collects information on a wide range of poverty indicators including anthropometric
status of children, subjective measures of poverty as well as conventional
money metric measures. As a part
of this activity, the SDS hosted a six-month visit by Dr Louis Manyukazi, the
former Statistician-General of Rwanda. With the support of the African
Development Bank and International Comparisons Project (ICP) based in
Washington DC, a new instrument is being developed for the collection of data
on the impact of the construction sector on poverty reduction. At the present
most international data exclude the construction of informal and traditional
housing. Specialist quantity surveyors will be involved in this project, which
will have global significance for the calculation and comparison of Gross
Domestic Product and poverty indicators if accepted. May is
the first person in a developing country to be appointed to the Technical
Advisory Group of the ICP, which guides the collection of data for the
calculation of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) used to standardise the
measurement of gross domestic product and poverty indicators. Working
with four telecentres in poor communities in KwaZulu-Natal, Community-based
Learning, ICT and Quality-of-life (CLIQ) trained 100 participants in the use of
computers and the internet. The impact of this training and their use of ICT have
been monitored using participatory research methods. In
Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya a project using panel data from 1 600
households interviewed in 2008 and again in 2010 has developed new methods of
depicting multi-dimensional poverty and has estimated the causal association
between ICT access and poverty reduction. This was presented to the international
ICT4D2010 conference held in London in 2010. The third
assessment is an impact assessment of the KwaZulu-Natal Gijima programme for
Local Economic Development (LED), which involves targeted grants to promote
poverty reduction through enterprise. A multi-disciplinary team of economists,
planners and impact specialists is working on this project. Finally,
using a competitive grant awarded by the European Union (EU) via the Programme
to Support Pro-Poor Policy Development (PSPPD), a collaborative project with the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cape Town
is examining factors influencing inequities in child outcomes |