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Poverty-eradication and
Sustainable Development
Michael Aliber

HSRC
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Integrated Rural and Regional Development Research Programme, Occasional Paper 1
Series Editor: Mike de Klerk (Executive Director: Integrated Rural and Regional Development,
Human Sciences Research Council)
Published by the Human Sciences Research Council Publishers
Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
© Human Sciences Research Council
First published 2002
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Preface

The Human Sciences Research Council publishes a number of
Occasional Papers series. These are designed to be quick,
convenient vehicles for making timely contributions to
debates, disseminating interim research findings and otherwise
engaging with the broader research community. Publications
in the various series are, in general, work-in-progress which
may develop into journal articles, chapters in books or other
final products. Authors invite comments and suggestions from
readers.


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About the Author

Michael Aliber joined the HSRC in February 2002 as a Chief
Research Specialist in the Integrated Rural and Regional
Development Programme. Since joining the HSRC, Dr Aliber
has completed a research project on the willing-buyer/willingseller approach to land redistribution, contributed to a study
on the link between HIV/AIDS and land tenure in KwaZuluNatal, and participated in a project to review Botswana’s land
policy. From March 2001 until January 2002, Dr Aliber was an
independent consultant, doing projects on land reform in
Uganda, poverty reduction and sustainable development in
South Africa, micro-finance in West Africa, East Africa and
Asia, and chronic poverty in South Africa. Previously, Dr
Aliber was a technical assistant in the Department of Land
Affairs in Pretoria focusing on land redistribution policy and

systems. Dr Aliber has a M.A. in Public Policy and a Ph.D. in
Agricultural and Applied Economics.
Comments and suggestions on this paper can be emailed to


Acknowledgement
This paper evolved from a study conducted on behalf of the
Department of Environment and Tourism in 2001. The author
would like to thank the Department for permission to use
materials previously covered in that study. The views
expressed here are not necessarily those of the Department of
Environment and Tourism or the HSRC.


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Poverty-eradication and
Sustainable Development

Introduction
This paper examines South Africa’s record since 1992 in eradicating poverty within a sustainable development framework as
spelt out in Agenda 21, the document adopted in that year by
the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro. It begins by presenting a
brief snapshot of poverty in South Africa, the better to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge of poverty eradication.
The next section presents an analytical overview of the relationship between poverty and the environment. Then, it
examines specific anti-poverty initiatives of the government,
and asks how successful they are in terms of reducing poverty,
and to what degree they do so in a manner that is consistent
with the principles of sustainable development. The paper
concludes by summarising the success of the government’s

anti-poverty measures in terms of the principles of the
National Environmental Management Act (Nema), and by
making recommendations for how some of the lapses could be
addressed.
Two qualifications should be indicated. First, although Agenda
21 was adopted in 1992, in practice our point of departure is
more typically 1994, i.e. the year in which the first raciallyinclusive democratic elections took place, and the ANC-led
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Michael Aliber

government took power. This year represented a watershed not
just in terms of power relations, but also coincided with the
introduction of new approaches to development and poverty
alleviation. Second, in some instances the anti-poverty government initiatives examined are not project interventions as such
but rather broad policy frameworks. In these cases, we ask not
how successful the frameworks have been in reducing poverty
through sustainable development (because that would be
exceptionally difficult to infer), but rather how coherent they
are in terms of poverty eradication through sustainable development, and their likely influence in the pursuit thereof.

A brief overview of poverty in South Africa
The particular configuration of poverty in South Africa is a
fairly straightforward outcome of colonial and apartheid
engineering. The most salient elements of this engineering were
large-scale land dispossession, the establishment of increasingly
overcrowded and poorly resourced homelands for the majority

black population, and the migratory labour system that formed
the backbone of the country’s mining and industrial sectors.
The geographical, racial, and gender dimensions of contemporary poverty are in large measure the legacy of this historical
experience. The focus here is on three aspects of poverty –
namely income poverty, quality of life and inequality.
Income poverty Based on a per adult equivalent poverty line
of R352 per month, in 1995 61% of Africans were poor, 38%
of coloureds, 5% of Indians, and 1% of whites (May et al.,
2000). Although the data are old and the percentages have
likely changed in the meantime, the stark racial differentiation
certainly still obtains. There is also a strong geographical
dimension to the incidence of poverty. Based on the same data
set, 72% of all poor people (those below the poverty line)
reside in rural areas, and 71% of all rural people are poor. By
most measures, the poorest provinces are those encompassing

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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

the most populous former homeland areas, namely KwaZuluNatal, Northern Province, and Eastern Cape.
A reasonable proxy for income poverty is child undernutrition. Around 23 per cent of children under six years of age
are stunted, indicating a protracted period of under-nutrition
(Steyn, 2000). The most seriously affected children are those in
rural areas whose mothers have relatively little education. In
addition, the infant mortality rate is eight to ten times higher
for blacks than for whites.

The way in which data are captured in Stats SA's main
annual survey, i.e. the October Household Survey, is not
comparable to that for the Income and Expenditure Survey of
1995, upon which the headcount measures reported above are
based. For that reason, it is not possible to state trends in the
headcount measure of income poverty since 1995.1 However,
the direction of the trend is not difficult to guess, given the
close relationship between poverty and unemployment. For
example, among those who were below the poverty line in
1995, the unemployment rate was 55%, where as among those
above the poverty line, the unemployment rate was 14% (May
et al., 2000). In terms of formal sector employment, in the 5
years since 1996 there has been a contraction of more than
800 000 jobs, or about 5% of the workforce. While there has
been a countervailing increase in informal sector employment,
it is well known that these jobs are much less remunerative on
average (Kingdon & Knight, 2000). The implication is that,
most likely, the prevalence of income poverty has worsened
over the past half decade.
An important dimension of income poverty that is receiving
more and more attention is its duration. Based on data from
KwaZulu-Natal, it would appear that more than half of those
households that were poor in 1998, were also poor in 1993,
meaning that they are ‘chronically poor’ (Roberts, 2000). At
least for the KwaZulu-Natal data set, the incidence of chronic
poverty tends to be much higher among rural households,
female-headed households, households with older household
heads, and those households with below-average access to less
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arable land. The experience of ‘transitory’ or ‘episodic’ poverty
– i.e. households that escaped poverty between 1993 and 1998
or, conversely, fell into poverty between 1993 and 1998 – is
largely a function of employment transitions, in terms of a
household member getting or losing a key job (Cichello, Fields
& Leibbrandt, 2000).
Quality of life By this we mean aspects of the experience of
well-being not necessarily related to personal income. One
major contributor to a good quality of life is access to services
and infrastructure, such as potable water, electricity, roads, etc.
Such services impact on quality of life in a number of ways, eg.
by diminishing the time or energy needed to collect water or
fuel wood, by diminishing the risks associated with unprotected water sources, poor waste disposal, or charcoal fires, and by
facilitating engagement in economic activities. Not surprisingly, access to services is highly differentiated between rural and
urban areas. As of 1995, only 21 per cent of rural households
had electricity within the house, against 82 per cent for urban
households. For indoor running water, the figures were 17 per
cent and 74 per cent respectively. While these gaps may have
narrowed somewhat under the post-apartheid government’s
infrastructure drive, the backlog remains large across the
whole range of services.
Other aspects of quality of life may be less tangible, but no
less important to the experience of poverty or non-poverty.
The Speak Out on Poverty Hearings sponsored by the South
African NGO Coalition (Sangoco) in 1998, evoked many of

the experiential aspects of poverty, including exposure to
crime and violence, a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness,
disrespect from government officials (eg. those responsible for
pension payouts), etc. The same could be said of the South
African Participatory Poverty Appraisal (SA-PPA) of 1999/
2000, which vividly portrayed the relationship of poverty to
hopelessness, social isolation and family fragmentation (May et
al., 1997).

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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

Inequality Inequalities in South Africa are extreme, as already
suggested by some of the headcount measures reported on
page 3. South Africa’s individual-based Gini coefficient is 0.73
(StatsSA, 2000), which is only excelled by a handful of
countries in the world. As shown in May et al. (1997), the
wealthiest ten per cent of the country’s households account for
40 per cent of all private income earned, and seven per cent of
the total population (implying smaller-than-average household
size). By contrast, the poorest 40 per cent of households
account for only 11 per cent of total income. As made evident
in the course of the poverty hearings, perceptions of continued
inequality do much to contribute to the disillusionment and
frustration associated with material poverty.
Inequality is also evident in terms of access to services,

health status, etc. For example, 18 per cent of households
within the poorest decile must travel more than one
kilometre to access water, versus 1 per cent of households in
the top three deciles (Budlender, 1999).

Poverty and environment in South Africa
Although the pre-1994 government attached considerable
significance to conservation of natural environments, its
approach required exclusion of local people from the environmentally protected areas converted into parks and reserves to
serve conservation and recreational interests. The impact of
these protected areas on the culture, livelihoods and environments of local people did not receive much attention. The
communities that were removed were often resettled on
inferior land (according to apartheid group areas or outside
the proclaimed parks), where previous livelihoods could not
be sustained and crowded conditions led to further degradation of the land. This series of events served to reinforce the
already prevalent view that poor people impact negatively on
the environment, which therefore needs to be protected by
their exclusion. The fact that poverty was often exacerbated as
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a consequence of already depleted or inferior environments
and the hidden costs of large-scale industrial exploitation was
largely ignored.
A fuller understanding of the relationship between
environment and poverty needs to take into account the

complex relations existing within each system. The environment is composed not only of ‘things’ but more importantly
the relations between them. Ecological relatedness of organisms is one example; how people relate to their environment
is another. Environmental degradation occurs as a consequence
of skewed power relationships where environmental resources
are used faster than nature produces them, or where wastes
from human production / consumption pollute the environment faster than nature can clean them. The potential for
environmental degradation is therefore inherent in human
existence (people sustain their living from the environment)
and not a recent phenomenon, but the current pace and global
scale of environmental degradation are unprecedented (Butler
& Hallows, 1998).
Similarly, poverty can be understood as a system of relationships that have the cumulative effect of excluding people
from processes of development and accumulation. Skewed
power relations and economic, political or social injustices that
deny people access to empowering resources such as safe
water, health services or education can be contributing factors.
The viability of people’s livelihoods is often largely contingent
on relationships that ensure the continued access to environmental resources. Such continued access, however, requires
not only the sustained provision of resources but also the just
and equitable access to them. Sustainable development can
thus be thought of as a pattern of relations between people
and between people and the environment that will ensure and
not undermine future development (Butler & Hallows, 1998).
What form should sustainable development take to benefit
people and their environment? What forms of interaction exist
currently and what kinds of interactions would be desirable or
necessary to maximise mutual benefits? The interface between
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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

poverty and environment is multi-layered and complex, often
appearing as self-perpetuating cycles or escalating downward
spirals. For example: many poor rural South Africans occupy
inferior land; in their attempt to eke out a living, they contribute to the downgrading of their environment; the impoverished environment exacerbates prevailing poverty, which in
turn puts more pressure on the environment. Such cycles are
hard to break and even more difficult to reverse.
A useful summary of the ways in which poverty and environment may interact is provided by Parnell’s (2000) five main
ways of understanding the interdependencies between poverty
and the environment. These are: poverty and environmental
governance; poverty, disasters and risk mitigation; poverty, the
environment and livelihoods; poverty and environmental
degradation; and poverty and environmental justice and
entitlement. Together, these modes of interaction provide an
overview of issues that need to be addressed, while a closer look
into each area reveals its complex nature and inter-relatedness
within the South African context, not least in relation to
development. These interdependencies are described here, with
an attempt to illustrate them through the historical example of
the former Betterment Schemes (see page 11).
Poverty and environmental governance ‘Environmental governance’ describes a form of decision-making and environmental
management that requires shared responsibility and the involvement of all affected parties. Such a thoroughly democratic
approach sets out to achieve greater efficiency as well as better
access and improved management. The move towards
governance is partly motivated by the failure of orthodox
approaches, where inadequate consultation or imposed ‘solutions’ jeopardise outcomes, as localised root causes remain
unaddressed because local people – especially low-income

people – are not involved and therefore ‘uncooperative’ since
their most pressing needs are largely unmet.
Poverty, disasters and risk mitigation Extreme natural events
exerting a cumulative or large-scale negative impact on the
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Michael Aliber

livelihoods of vulnerable people – i.e. disasters – are seldom
entirely natural. Many human-made factors contribute to
natural hazards, either by creating environmental conditions
conducive to disaster, or through ‘social processes and conditions that leave people vulnerable, exposing them to shock
while rendering them unable to maintain their ability to meet
their own basic needs’ (Parnell, 2000). Among the factors that
contribute to increased vulnerability or an environmental
predisposition to disasters are population growth; urbanisation; inadequate settlement regulation; international financial
interventions; land degradation; global changes in environment
and climate; and war.
In the short term, natural extremes are beyond human
control, other than by refining available methods of forecasting
and intervening to minimise the impact. Far more effective
control can be applied to the human behaviour affecting
environmental hazards and to political, social and economic
systems of unjust power relations that leave people vulnerable
and unable to prepare for and respond to disaster. Mitigation
of risks, either to reduce the likelihood of a negative event or
to improve people’s ability to cope in the face of such an

event, presents considerable scope for development in the
areas of poverty and environment.
Poverty, the environment and livelihoods The livelihoods
model pays attention to relationships at a micro-level, with the
understanding that access to resources is contingent on
relationships within a household, within the wider community
and to the economy at large. In some areas the poor organise
and maximise largely in non-monetary terms, thus their
livelihood strategies are heavily reliant on natural resources
and/or social capital. Most rural households, however, pursue
diversified livelihood strategies, thus even those who do not
identify themselves as farmers may rely on natural resources to
a very important degree. The question about what social
conditions might serve to maximise the opportunities afforded

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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

by natural or environmental resources needs to be addressed in
both rural and urban contexts.
The livelihoods approach helps one to appreciate different
perspectives of policy-makers with respect to the relationship
between low-income households and the environment, be they
explicit or implicit (Salafsky & Wollenberg, 2000). In the
‘protected area strategy’, local livelihoods are regarded as a
threat to the environment and are therefore summarily

excluded. A great deal of power is necessary to establish and
maintain protected areas and to stop local stakeholders from
violating regulations, and, as such, threats to the environment
are not mitigated but are merely being kept at bay. This
approach was widely practised by the apartheid government
and contributed a great deal to current conditions of poverty
and environmental degradation. With the ‘substitution
strategy’, local stakeholders are allowed limited access to
protected areas, but substitute livelihood activities are
promoted for the sake of mitigating the pressure on those areas.
Harmful livelihood activities are still contained by authority,
thus requiring costly maintenance in the face of ongoing threat
to the environment. Finally, the ‘linked incentives strategy’ sets
out to establish a system whereby promotion of livelihoods and
care for the environment positively reinforce one another.
Rather than minimising or eliminating the inter-relatedness of
livelihoods with the environment, it attempts to accept reliance
on the environment in such a manner that care for the
environment becomes indispensable to livelihood practice and
continuity. This third strategy corresponds to the ethos of
sustainable development. While the micro-focus of the
livelihoods model takes into account people’s interests and
relationships it tends to understate macro-influences such as
the formal economy and global pressures.
Poverty and environmental degradation, war and disease
While traditional perspectives on environmental degradation
maintained the destructive impact of the poor, the ‘new
degradationists’ shift the emphasis from physical degradation
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to the social costs of unsustainable consumption and production. The poor are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and degradation as a consequence of social,
moral and political conditions, which contradict basic human
and environmental rights. War and civil conflict undermine
environmental justice and entitlement, thereby contributing
to environmental destruction and disease.
Poverty, and environmental justice and entitlement Unbalanced power relationships often leave the poor largely bearing the
costs of unsustainable and unjust practices, which further
disempower them and increase their vulnerability. Where
overarching patterns of inequality in respect of allocation of
water rights and the location of wastes and other hazards are
impacting on people’s lives, issues of degradation, pollution
and land use are being turned into mobilising platforms,
seeking social justice in environmental matters. Environment
has become a social issue of the present, taking into account
past and future generations. While civil organisations form
around issues of improved living conditions, the reduction of
inequality and justice in ‘environmental language’, their
struggles are reflected in the international recognition of
environmental entitlement as the rights of the poor to quality
and healthy neighbourhoods. The brutal social and environmental consequences of war and environmental racism are
under scrutiny, while the empowering contribution of indigenous environmental knowledge and practice are receiving
increasing recognition.
A fuller appreciation of the different ways in which poverty
and environment are related provides a more complete picture
of the damaging reinforcement between poverty and environmental stress in the past, as well as a vantage from which to

understand the post-apartheid government’s efforts to come
to grips with poverty eradication through sustainable
development.

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The Betterment Schemes in the former homelands
The so-called ‘Betterment Policy’was proclaimed in 1939 and applied
to all homeland areas. It was motivated in large part by fears of the
white government that environmental collapse in the homelands
would have negative repercussions for the rest of the country
outside of the homelands (Beinart & Coates, 1995). The primary tool
of Betterment was rigorous land-use planning and the forcible
imposition of those plans. People living in sparse settlements were
compelled to resettle in villages, and arable and grazing areas were
designated, in the belief that this would result in a more productive
and sustainable use of natural resources.
The results of Betterment, which did not pick up pace until the
1950s, were contrary to the government’s expectations. The forcible
relocation of households and communities damaged existing
systems of livestock control, and concentrated the impact of
livestock around new settlements where previously the impact was
diffuse. Whereas homesteads were previously located on or near
choice arable land, their relocation often put them at a distance from
the best fields, leading to land under-utilisation.

Although an extreme example, Betterment illustrates in a negative
form a number of important interdependencies between poverty and
the environment. First, the principle of environmental governance was
violated extravagantly, in that the entire system was imposed from
outside. The authority of traditional leaders was undermined while
indigenous knowledge was disregarded (Cross et al., 1996). Therefore,
even apart from the dictatorial manner in which the schemes were
implemented – which led to resistance in and of itself – the schemes
were injudicious because they did not take into account the logic of the
existing land-use systems,nor the overall livelihood strategies on which
people depended.
Second, the new land-use system under Betterment exacerbated
households’ vulnerability to negative shocks such as drought. The
inappropriate re-designation of land use, together with the attempt
to impose controls on stock numbers and movements, resulted in
less flexibility in the face of weather fluctuations, thus forcing
households to adopt strategies of risk-coping that were either less
environmentally sustainable or more personally costly (eg. more
planting of marginal areas).

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Lastly,of course,the entire homeland system is a prime example of the
relationship between environmental injustice and poverty.In the event,
both the injustice and the poverty were only worsened by Betterment
planning.

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Policy developments and implications for sustainability
This section analyses progress to date in terms of promoting
poverty eradication through sustainable development. Five types
of government initiatives that have had a direct bearing on
poverty eradication and sustainable development are examined.
These range from broad policy frameworks to specific projectbased interventions, and include:
• national economic and development policy frameworks,
specifically the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the National Growth and Development
Strategy (NGDS), and the Growth, Employment and
Redistribution strategy (GEAR);
• anti-poverty strategies, namely the Poverty Alleviation Fund
and the general move towards developmental welfare;
• public-works programmes aimed at promoting environmental
conservation and job-creation, namely the Working for Water
Programme and the LandCare Programme;
• major infrastructure programmes, with a focus on the national
housing programme; and
• second-generation grand integration strategies, namely the
Rural Development Programme and the Urban Renewal
Strategy.
While these initiatives do not exhaust the policy developments
that have, or have had, a bearing on poverty eradication and
sustainable development, they cover a sufficiently broad
spectrum to help appreciate progress to date.2 The analysis relies
principally on existing evaluations and discussions with key
informants and, rather than presenting a definitive evaluation of
each initiative, seeks to infer patterns and trends in terms of what
government has accomplished by way of promoting poverty

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eradication and sustainable development since 1992, and what
does and does not appear to work at the interface of poverty
eradication and environmental conservation.

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National economic and policy frameworks
Just prior to the first racially-inclusive democratic elections in
1994, the ANC published a policy document for the RDP in
which it identified the vast number of areas in which it would
seek to transform South Africa. The central theme of the RDP
was reducing the poverty of the majority of South Africans,
and thereby redressing the inequalities and injustices of
colonialism and apartheid. Access to water, jobs, land, education, and health care were among the priorities highlighted.
Significantly, the RDP policy framework hinted at the multiple connections that exist between poverty and environmental
degradation:
Apartheid legislation distorted access to natural resources, denying
the majority of South Africans the use of land, water, fisheries,
minerals, wildlife and clean air. South Africa’s apartheid policies ...
contributed to the degradation of environmental resources,
including soil, water and vegetation ... Poverty and environmental
degradation have been closely linked (ANC, 1994).

Also, although vague as to what the country’s new economic
policy would entail, the founding document of the RDP

explicitly embraced an ethos of sustainable development:
The democratic government must ensure that all South African
citizens, present and future, have the right to a decent quality of
life through sustainable use of resources. To achieve this, the
government must work towards:
• equitable access to natural resources;
• safe and healthy living and working environments;
• and a participatory decision-making process around environmental issues, empowering communities to manage their
natural environment (ANC, 1994).

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It could be argued, therefore, that the fate of the country’s
attention to people-centred sustainable development is in part
reflected in the fate of the RDP. Thus, succinctly, we describe
what became of the RDP.
Following the April 1994 election, an RDP Office was
established within the Office of the President, charged with
the responsibility of co-ordinating RDP-related activities,
including the spending of the initially modest RDP budget. In
November 1994, the ANC-led government introduced the
RDP White Paper, the content of which was similar to that of
the earlier policy framework document, but arguably with a
more ‘business friendly’ and fiscally conservative bent (Bond,
2000). One of the important tasks of the RDP Office was the

co-ordination of the NGDS, which was initiated in mid-1995,
on behalf of the President’s Office. The purpose of the NGDS
was to harmonise the activities of all of the government
departments and provinces, by getting each department and
province to subscribe to a common set of goals – the six ‘core
pillars’ – and to indicate in what fashion it would meet those
goals, and with what resources.
The NGDS’ six core pillars were, briefly, investing in people,
creating employment, investing in household and economic
infrastructure, crime prevention, poverty alleviation and the
creation of safety nets, and transforming institutions of
governance. As such, the NGDS was not a macroeconomic
strategy, but an institutionalisation of an integrated policymaking process geared to the realisation of the principles of the
RDP. Among its other virtues, the NGDS established a forum
wherein departmental officials at various levels could discuss
among themselves their goals, strategies and needs, thereby
allowing for the possibility of integration and coherence that,
arguably, the government has since been struggling to regain.
In early 1996, after much public debate as to what the RDP
meant for economic policy, the RDP Office was closed and its
staff dispersed to various government departments. The NGDS
disappeared. The closure of the RDP Office appeared to have
been a consequence of the introduction by the Department of
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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

Finance in that year of the framework for GEAR. GEAR is a
conventional neo-liberal macroeconomic recipe for economic
growth. While perhaps not intrinsically incompatible with the
goals of either the RDP or the nascent NGDS, GEAR eclipsed
the latter as the central economic and developmental programme of the government and, notwithstanding repeated
claims to the contrary, essentially subordinated the RDP. The tag
‘RDP’ lives on mainly as an adjective used to identify certain propoor public investments, as in ‘RDP housing’.
The usual neo-liberal tenet is that poverty eradication follows
economic growth. Certainly one would agree that an expanding
economy that offered more employment would have the effect
of diminishing poverty. According to the founding document of
GEAR, the economic forecasts contingent on the adoption of
this strategy placed the cumulative number of new jobs in the
economy at 1.3 million. In the event that these new jobs fail to
materialise – which they did not – the GEAR strategy has very
little to offer by way of poverty reduction. The word
‘redistribution’ from the strategy’s title appears to relate more to
this potential equilibrating aspect of growth than any direct
programme of, say, redistribution of assets. Otherwise, the
document mentions poverty in only three contexts:
• the importance of continuing with the system of social
grants for addressing poverty;
• the importance of improving access to potable water; and
• as one consideration among others in whether there would
be merit in introducing a minimum wage.
The environment does not figure either in any integral way in
the original GEAR framework. One of the few direct mentions
of environment is the following:
Projects which meet certain basic conditions will be awarded a tax
holiday, the duration of which will depend on three criteria. The

basic qualifying conditions, which will include a sufficient level of
domestic value added in a manufacturing process ... and evidence
of a commitment to key economic goals including human
resource development, foreign exchange conservation and

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environmental responsibility, are not intended to be unduly
restrictive (Department of Finance, 1996).

The fact that ‘environmental responsibility’ is something
government should take into account when evaluating applications for tax holidays, but not in too limiting a manner, reflects
an underlying assumption of the contradiction between
environmental integrity and economic progress.
While it is certainly not fair to judge an entire macroeconomic strategy by its founding document, it does appear that the
adoption of GEAR represents a step backwards for poverty
eradication and for sustainable development. Four observations are appropriate: first, GEAR does not appear to embrace
a sustainable development ethic, even implicitly; second,
GEAR appears to lack sophistication in the complex area of
poverty eradication; third, GEAR effectively replaced the
RDP, which did embrace an ethic of poverty eradication
through sustainable development; and fourth, the adoption of
GEAR spelt the demise of the institutionalised inter-departmental policy development forum that the NGDS promised
to provide, and which we maintain was conducive to the
pursuit of sustainable development. The fact that GEAR

simply has not worked out as planned, in the sense that its
macroeconomic projections have failed to come to fruition,
compounds this negative assessment. Probably the most
unfortunate aspect of the evolution of the economy since the
adoption of GEAR in 1996, is the continued shedding of
formal-sector employment, one consequence of which has
been an increasing embrace by the government of informal
sector self-employment as an engine of job-creation. Unfortunately, government’s efforts to provide direct assistance to the
informal sector through promotion of micro-finance and the
setting up of advice centres, have not shown impressive
results3 (Aliber, 2001).

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Anti-poverty strategies
The first democratically elected government of 1994 inherited a
serious and worsening unemployment problem, which GEAR –
adopted two years later but which had presumably been in the
works since some time earlier – has not been capable of reversing. In part because of this, government introduced in 1998 the
Special Allocation for Poverty Relief, Infrastructure Investment
and Job Summit Projects, or simply the Poverty Alleviation Fund.
The Poverty Alleviation Fund initially took over the remaining
RDP funds, but in 1998/99 was capitalised by the central
government with an additional R598 million, or 0.35 per cent of
the total non-interest government budget for that year. Part of

the original thinking around the Fund was apparently to balance
the impact of GEAR, not least in terms of public perceptions
that were hostile to GEAR and to the closing of the RDP Office.4
The way the Fund works is that national government departments are invited to submit proposals (business plans) to the
National Treasury, which evaluates the submissions and then
makes recommendations to Cabinet. In theory, the process is
independent of departments’ normal budgeting cycle, in part
because the departments are meant to be requesting money for
functions that they would not otherwise perform or have not
traditionally budgeted for. Indeed, one of the original stated
rationales for the Fund was to ‘assist provinces in reorienting
their services to the poor’ (Department of Finance, 2000).
However, in practice much of the poverty alleviation funding
goes to departmental projects that are co-funded through
departmental budgets.
Some of the departments to which resources from the Fund
have been allocated have made significant accomplishments,
such as the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (see page
20) and the Department of Public Works, which together
accounted for more than half of the Fund for 1999/2000. However, one of the initial problems with the Poverty Alleviation
Fund was the inability of some of its subscribing departments to
spend the money allocated to them. Most conspicuous in this
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Michael Aliber

regard was the Department of Welfare, whose allocation of

R204 million in 1998/99 went almost entirely unspent (Idasa,
2000). The Department of Social Development has sought to
compensate for its lack of management capacity by out-sourcing
some of this work to a parastatal, the Independent Development Trust (IDT).
One reason that the Department of Welfare failed to spend
this allocation, as well as a significant portion of its own budget,
was that it was venturing into difficult new territory. In 1997 the
department released the White Paper for Social Welfare, which
signalled, inter alia, a shift in direction towards ‘developmental
welfare’, meaning assisting people to help themselves out of
poverty. Thus the renamed Department of Social Development
sought to move beyond its traditional mandate of distributing
social security grants and providing social welfare services, to
assisting low-income groups develop income-generating
projects. It was laudable but its staff lacked the management
capacity and skills to do this (Everatt, Khumalo & Zulu, 2001),
and seemingly the poverty relieving achievements to date have
been modest. The problem of lack of capacity has been exacerbated by the common approach whereby assistance for incomegenerating projects is only available to people who have formed
themselves into groups. In some provinces this means that
project groups must be formulated as non-profit legal entities in
terms of the Non-profit Organisations Act (1997), which
stipulates a minimum of ten members (Aliber, 2001).
It is understandable that a group-oriented approach has been
adopted because it provides at least a remote chance that a
meaningful number of people can be reached; however, the
fragility of such groups calls into question the efficacy of this
approach. In comparison to most natural small, medium and
micro-enterprises (SMMEs), ten is a very large number of
people, to say nothing of the well-known weaknesses of what
are essentially production co-operatives.

Regardless of the specific problems that may plague some
departments accessing the Poverty Alleviation Fund, it is doubtful whether it has been instrumental in re-directing government
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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

departments towards poverty alleviation. The Working for
Water and Community-Based Public Works Programmes are
the two main components of the Fund but both pre-existed it.
The third largest component is that going to the Department of
Social Development. Although some of the other departmental
initiatives drawing on the scheme may have been stimulated by
the Fund to begin with, a reasonable interpretation is that the
Poverty Alleviation Fund is now little more than a banner
behind which existing initiatives are lined up. Ironically, its
existence gives the impression that less money is spent on antipoverty measures by government than is truly the case, but also
that there is more strategic thinking uniting these initiatives
than can fairly be claimed. By virtue of the apparently ad hoc
manner in which the Fund is allocated among different departments’ business plans, it does not form part of or contribute to
a ‘coherent, systematic and integrated poverty reduction
strategy’ (IDASA, 2000).

Public works programmes
Most of the discussion about poverty eradication and sustainable development has thus far been at the level of conceptual
frameworks. It is time to focus on a particular type of intervention that directly seeks to address sustainability and
poverty eradication tangibly and together, namely conservation-oriented public works programmes. Two such programmes are the Working for Water Programme of the Department
of Water Affairs and Forestry, and the LandCare Programme of

the National Department of Agriculture (see page 20). Interestingly, the RDP policy framework from 1994 anticipated
such programmes: ‘There must be a co-ordinated national
public works programme to provide much-needed infrastructure, to repair environmental damage, and to link back
into, expand and contribute to the restructuring of the
industrial and agricultural base’ (ANC, 1994).

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Michael Aliber

The Working for Water Programme and the LandCare Programme are variations on a theme: they consist of interventions
aimed at preventing or reversing environmental degradation;
participants are paid a wage in order to provide labour for the
achievement of conservation tasks; and there is ostensibly a fair
amount of attention to related activities such as education and
skills transfer, creation of secondary industries, etc. Like the
other main public works initiative, the Community-Based
Public Works Programme,5 LandCare and Working for Water
are financed in part through the Poverty Alleviation Fund.

The Working for Water and LandCare
Working for Water The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry
(DWAF) launched this programme in 1995. The purpose of the
programme is to eradicate alien plant species that deplete available
surface and groundwater, impair biodiversity, and contribute to the
danger of runaway fires. Roughly 8 per cent of the country has been
infested with alien plant species, most of which are trees that are not

coincidentally also used in commercial forestry. Unchecked, the area
covered by alien vegetation has the capacity to double every 15
years.
The Working for Water Programme spent about R824 million
between 1995/1996 and 1999/2000, of which the vast majority has
gone to wages for labour-intensive clearing. The annual budget now
rests at around R220, or roughly 30 per cent more than was spent on
land redistribution in 2000/01. In 1999/2000, about 112 000 hectares
had been cleared, together with another 121 000 hectares that were
cleared as a follow-up to earlier clearings.
The Working for Water Programme is one of the government’s
most visible and esteemed initiatives, and with good reason. It
consistently succeeds in spending a high percentage of its budget
allocation; it secures contributions from the private sector and
foreign donors, and captures an ever-increasing allocation from the
Poverty Alleviation Fund. In addition, it has received numerous
awards, and boasts a complement of 12 cabinet ministers as board
members.

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Poverty-eradication and Sustainable Development

LandCare The National Department of Agriculture (NDA) initiated
this programme in 1998. Inspired by a similar programme in
Australia, the overall goal of the LandCare programme is ‘...to
optimise productivity and sustainability of resources so as to result in

greater productivity, food security, job creation and a better quality
of life for all’ (EDA, 1999). Because of the salient job-creation element
within the objective, the LandCare Programme was allocated R25
million following the Presidential Job Summit of 1998.
The LandCare Programme comprises five main elements: major
resource conservation works; community and staff capacity building;
awareness; policy and legislation; and research and monitoring. The
bulk of direct interaction with low-income households occurs
through the first two elements, which are therefore focused on here.
In addition, in terms of budget these first two elements account for
60 per cent and 20 per cent respectively of the overall budget for the
programme.
The overall responsibility for the programme rests with the NDA,
while the provincial agriculture departments serve as the ‘provincial
land-care co-ordinators’. As provincial co-ordinators, the provincial
agriculture departments are responsible, inter alia, for the
management of conservation works and community capacity
building, either directly or through service providers such as privatesector consultants and NGOs. Provincial agriculture departments are
also responsible for the creation of ‘local land-care committees’,
usually established at the regional or district level, which bring
together various stakeholders including staff of provincial
agriculture departments, commercial farmers, small-scale farmers
and community leaders.
As of 1999, there were 23 ‘focused investment’ conservation
projects across the country, and 33 community grant-based projects.
As of 2000, the programme claimed that it had rehabilitated 48 000
hectares. While this is perhaps a very good start, it represents a mere
0.8 per cent of the total degraded area of the country, and signifies
nothing about the ability of the programme to stem the degradation
of areas of the country not yet classified as degraded.

The four provinces of Mpumalanga, Northern Province, EasternCape and KwaZulu-Natal, capture 80 per cent of the overall LandCare
budget. There appears to be a fair amount of provincial variation in

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