Affiliations: [a] School of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa | [b] Department of Statistics, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park Kingsway Campus, Johannesburg, South Africa
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Yegnanew A. Shiferaw, Department of Statistics, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park Kingsway Campus, PO Box 524, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa. E-mail: yegnanews@uj.ac.za.
Abstract: Poverty, inequality, and unemployment are on the rise in South Africa. The focus of this study is on school-age children in poverty. Education is a critical policy imperative for the country. Model-based small area estimation was conducted to estimate the different poverty measures for lower and upper bound poverty levels. The primary data sources are the Income and Expenditure Survey 2010/2011 and the 2011 national population census. The model diagnostics and the validation of the estimates showed that the model-based estimates at the local municipality level are more reliable than the direct estimates. There are significant variations in poverty across the local municipalities of South Africa; therefore, spatially targeted poverty alleviation programmes are more beneficial.
