KIM POLLEY | South Africa keeps fighting inequality at the wrong end

South Africa’s inequality debate is loud, familiar and still oddly incomplete.

The late economist Mike Schüssler believed we are looking in the wrong place. His argument was that a large part of inequality takes shape long before anyone enters the labour market. It begins inside the household.

That is not a moral point. It is a structural one. If a child grows up in a household where one adult is expected to earn, care, supervise, manage stress, absorb shocks and somehow still build a future, that child begins life with less support than one raised in a household where those burdens are shared more widely. That difference does not stay contained inside the home. It shows up later in education, stability, mobility and earning power.

This is not a side issue. Stats SA’s 2024 general household survey found that only 31.4% of children lived with both parents. Nearly half lived with their mothers only. Almost one in five lived with neither biological parent. In rural South Africa, only 19.3% of children lived with both parents, compared with 40.2% in urban areas.

Those are not soft social indicators. They are part of the country’s economic architecture. They tell us that inequality is not only about what the labour market rewards; it is also about the conditions in which children arrive at the starting line.

The class divide appears even earlier than many people assume. The South African Early Childhood Review found that among young children in the poorest 20% of households, only 19% live with both parents. In the wealthiest 20%, the figure is 78%.

By the time South Africa starts debating wages and jobs, much of the divergence is already under way. Some children grow up with more adult time, more routine, more support with schooling and more protection from household shocks. Others do not. That shapes what they can convert income into and how well they recover when one thing goes wrong.

This is where Schüssler’s point is stronger than many people realise. He was not claiming that single-parent households are the cause of inequality. He was not making a moral case about family form. He was pointing to a pattern that policy debate prefers to skirt. Poverty, unemployment, labour market exclusion and fragile household formation reinforce one another.

There is an obvious South African caveat. Co-residence is not the same as support. In a country shaped by labour migration and multi-local family life, a non-resident parent may still provide financially or remain involved in a child’s life. That matters and should be acknowledged.

But the broader point survives the caveat. The real question is not whether every child lives with both parents. It is how much stable adult capacity surrounds that child. How much earning power, caregiving bandwidth, supervision and shock absorption exists around them.

At the sharpest edge of this problem are child-headed households, where adult support is absent rather than stretched. They are not the main statistical story, and they should not be used carelessly. But they are a reminder of how severe household fragility can become and how exposed some children are before the market or the state enters the picture.

This does not diminish the role of unemployment, historical exclusion or weak economic growth. These forces are deeply entangled with household instability and help explain why fragmentation is more prevalent in poorer economies. But it does challenge the assumption that inequality can be meaningfully reduced through wage adjustments or redistribution alone.

South Africa’s grants system matters. It reduces hardship and reaches millions. But cash alone cannot fully compensate for thin caregiving capacity, unstable support, weak supervision, unsafe environments, transport burdens and poor early learning conditions. That is why a country can expand transfers and still remain trapped in high child poverty and weak mobility.

We should care about this because it changes where the real bottleneck sits. If inequality is being reproduced partly through household conditions and early childhood support, South Africa is dealing with more than a pay and transfer problem. It is dealing with a capability problem. That has consequences for labour market readiness, productivity, education outcomes, social stability and long-term growth.

Schüssler’s challenge was that South Africa spends too much time looking at the worker’s payslip and too little time looking at the child’s household. He had a point. A serious inequality agenda cannot end with tax, wages and grants.

It also has to ask what strengthens caregiver capacity, what improves child maintenance compliance, what supports early childhood development and what reduces the costs of household instability before disadvantage hardens into destiny.

• Polley is CEO: UK & Africa for Frontière Advisory.