About five years after a provincially disaggregated poverty profiling, the National Development Agency (NDA) deems it due for a similar assessment. The follow-up assessment is particularly relevant in connection to South Africa‟s bold adoption of the poverty-related millennium Development goals. This is the basis of the current report. The overriding question informing this assessment relates to active participation of the poor in the economic growth process.

This work does not only adopt quantitative measures of consumption-based poverty (in line with studies of this kind), but also analyses in the lens of the other dimensions of wellbeing, mainly, health, education, employment, access to services. We then examine the seriousness and distribution of poverty across space, gender and racial profile, followed by the characteristics of the poor, the changes in poverty and the associated factors over time. The changes are then linked to the policy context and the other dimensions identified in literature. The core datasets are from the Statistics South Africa (STATSSA). Those rich in consumption and income variables are the income and expenditure surveys (IES, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010) and household living conditions survey (2009).