Regular, high quality data is needed to assess progress made in the war on poverty, Stats SA said on Tuesday.

The Living Conditions Survey, the first of its scope and kind in South Africa, was the best way to measure the state of poverty, Statistician General Pali Lehohla told journalists in Pretoria.

"It is clear that this survey is expanding definitions of poverty based on money-metric models to include others forms of poverty," he said. These included relative poverty and subjective poverty, which was the perception that people had.

"Inequality is an important aspect of poverty measurements. Without that information, we will not know which direction poverty is going. We can say that it [poverty] is declining, but we wouldn't know whether the poor are getting poorer, or the rich are getting richer."

Other indicators that would inform the statistics would be health and nutrition of children in households – whether they were underweight or if their growth was stunted.

Access to, quality of and affordability of basic services, as well as access to, usage and productivity of land, would also form a basis of the research.

Getting households to participate

Data from more than 30 000 households in nine provinces would be collected before August next year, Lehohla said.

The field work, which began in September this year, is expected to conclude in August 2009.

One of the biggest problems facing the survey would be getting households to participate. This was especially the case in affluent "high walled" households.

However, he said, the Statistics Act gave the statistician general the power to coerce people to respond.

"The law says you will comply, and the law compels them to comply." He said perhaps one of the problems the households had in participating in the survey, was that its benefits were not fully understood.

"The problems of the poor are ultimately the problems of the rich," said Lehohla.

He said the survey, which would be repeated in 2013, would go a long way to measuring how South Africa was faring in meeting its Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015.

Nature of poverty

Currently the profiling of people whose living conditions were measured against the poverty line was a contested issue.

This was because more understanding was needed of the nature of poverty and inequality in relation to the major shifts in policy and trends in the economy, said Lehohla.

Deputy director general Kefiloe Masiteng said by the survey had been given R250-million in funding across three years, the bulk of which was allocated to the 14 months of field work.

By the end of this year, "publicity officers" were expected to have visited 10 000 selected households as a precursor to the interview.

A household questionnaire, a weekly diary and a community level questionnaire filled in by a community leader would form the basis for the survey.

Households would be expected to "open their doors" for a period of six consecutive weeks.

Masiteng said some people were unwilling to participate because of issues of trusts or unavailability. The Stats SA interviewers were trying to work around this, she said.

"(They) try and fit in around the times of the correspondent. (But) we can't deliver this kind of information if the citizenry don't participate."

Sapa