However, 23 million people were still considered poor in 2023 using the food poverty line. This is revealed in the Poverty Trends Report presented by the entity on Thursday morning in Tshwane. As of 2023, we had 10.8 million persons who fell below the food poverty line, representing 17.6%.
Statistician-general Risenga Maluleke said the data was drawn from the Income and Expenditure Survey conducted between 2022 and 2023; however, the report spans 2006 to 2023. Maluleke said the food poverty line, the most extreme measure, was R777 per person per month — the amount people need to meet their basic food needs each month. “If a person…doesn’t have this minimum income, they would not be able to have enough food to sustain them or the calories to sustain them daily,” he said.
Maluleke said Stats SA places particular emphasis on the lower-bound poverty line — R1,300 per person per month — because it reflects the difficult trade-offs households must make. “People have to make a decision…whether they can buy food or other necessities; if they have to give their child money to take transport to school, or they have to look at other issues that are necessities within their household. “We take particular interest in this poverty line because the National Development Plan says that we are going to track the lower bound poverty line as a measure of our poverty,” he said.
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The upper-bound poverty line stands at R2,635, representing the point at which South Africans can meet their basic lifestyle needs. Maluleke said the decline in poverty is visible across all three measures — the food poverty line and the lower and upper bound poverty lines. “We can see that the lower bound poverty line is declining. So poverty is declining in SA, and when we look at all lines, we can see that coming out of 2015 to 2023, the lower bound poverty line has declined by 8.8%.
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