Despite a fall in its incidence between 2015 and 2023, well over half of South Africa’s children experience poverty, according to a report issued by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The report looks at what it terms “multidimensional child poverty” (children are defined as people aged 17 and younger), which assesses well-being across seven dimensions. These are nutrition; health; protection; child development; education; housing; and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). The objective is to understand trends in child development, safety, and future opportunities.

Multidimensional poverty is meant to look beyond income and financial metrics (“money metric” poverty) to determine well-being and deprivation. From this perspective, large numbers of children whose households are not typically viewed as poor in monetary terms may be suffering from multidimensional poverty. Stats SA estimates that by the money metric – those living in households whose income falls below the Lower Bound Poverty level of some R1 300 per person per month (in March 2025) – an estimated 49.1% of children live in poverty.

Multidimensional child poverty, however, stood at 60.8% in 2015, and had fallen to 57.3% in 2023. This demonstrated modest progress at best. The largest improvement was among the youngest cohort, 0-4 years, where multidimensional poverty declined from 58.1% to 51.5%.

Children living in provinces with large rural hinterlands – the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, and KwaZulu-Natal – were particularly badly affected by poverty. In the Eastern Cape, some 75.8% of children lived in poverty in 2023, as did 73.7% in Limpopo and 71.9% in KwaZulu-Natal. More urbanised (and wealthier) provinces, such as the Western Cape and Gauteng, had lower levels of multidimensional poverty, with the former recording a level of 36.8% and the latter 35.9% in 2023.

A piece of good news was that the multidimensional poverty rate in Limpopo, while remaining high, had fallen by close to nine percentage points, from 82.4% in 2015 to 73.7% in 2023.

Similarly, in South Africa’s eight metropolitan areas, the proportion of children in poverty stood at 39.8% in 2023, as opposed to 67% outside these centres. In other words, there was considerably less deprivation in the larger cities. However, in non-metropolitan areas, there had been a decline of five percentage points in multidimensional child poverty against 2015, whereas there had been little change in the metropolitan areas.

Poverty was markedly more prevalent where household heads lacked education.

The report also identified (as expected) a strong correlation between income poverty and overall multidimensional deprivation. In 2015, some 78.9% of children in “poor” households (by the money metric) suffered multidimensional poverty. In 2023, the proportion stood at 78.2%. In both years, children in these circumstances faced deprivation in an average of four of the seven dimensions.

In non-poor households (in money metric terms), just over a third, 35.2%, were multidimensionally poor in 2015. Concerningly, this had risen by 2023, to 37.1%.

In the introduction to the report, Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke comments: “By focusing explicitly on children, this report emphasises the need for targeted, evidence-based actions that prioritise children in poverty-reduction efforts.”

The data strongly suggest the need for considerably accelerated economic growth – the anaemic levels the country has been able to achieve place a hard brake on the potential of any upliftment efforts – as well as rethinking current understandings of development. Failings in governance, in particular, have meant that the considerable sums put towards improving living standards and encouraging socio-economic mobility have failed. Robust spending on education, for example, is not matched by outcomes in literacy and numeracy, while infrastructural degradation is undermining progress already made in providing water and sanitation services.