The weak quality of education received by most poor children in South Africa places them in permanent disadvantage relative to those attending the mainly more affluent and better performing schools. This document draws from a large number of studies undertaken for a major project and summarises this evidence, which illustrating that low quality schools act as a poverty trap.

Internal migration in South Africa has a strong gender dimension. Historically, the apartheid-era migrant labour system meant that predominantly black African men moved to urban areas without their families. After the abolition of influx controls in 1986, many women relocated, presumably to join their male partners. The period of migration feminization was also coupled with labour market feminization. However, existing research shows that increased female labour supply was poorly matched by labour market absorption, leading to rising unemployment among black African women. This paper studies incentives for female migration in this context, by building a gravity model of male and female inter-municipal migration. We find that neither men nor women move primarily for family reasons. Instead, they follow the traditional male migrant route to well-lit economic centres. Women also do not migrate primarily for increases in their own labour market opportunities, but tend to flock to regions where other fortunate groups have higher earnings potential. While this might signal that migrants base relocation decisions on incorrect information (and could in turn explain why many migrants have unfulfilled expectations), our results also show that women not only move for work, but for public services. The implications are twofold if migration is to alleviate poverty in the long run: first, in the short run, management of public resources must improve, as poor (women) place large emphasis on their effect; and second, labour market barriersespecially into the informal sectorshould be better understood.JEL classification: C21, R23, R2, J16

Social spending has become a major tool of targeting resources to South Africa's poor. The poor now get considerably more than their population share of social spending, but the underlying distribution of income is so skewed that overall post-fiscal inequality has not improved much. Concentration ratios and curves show considerable shifts in social spending incidence in the period 1995 to 2006. However, the efficiency of that spending is low, resulting in limited social outcomes and consequently also limited gains to the poor from better targeting. This paper therefore calls for the South African policy discussion to shift to why the ever-increasing fiscal inputs and improved targeting of those inputs have not produced the desired social outcomes.

The paper estimates a gravity model to analyse migration in contemporary Namibia, with the specific aim of understanding differences in long and short-distance migration. The sample is restricted to migrants moving in 2010 and 2011, who are between the ages of 20 and 49 years. Given Namibia's history of apartheid-era segregation, the sample is later restricted to Africanlanguage speaking migrants to determine whether the distances traveled to satisfy information and finance-constrained needs differ from that of the full population. A zero-inflated negative binomial model is applied to estimate the effects of constituency-level economic indicators, labour market conditions, agricultural activity, and built amenities on migration flows. Regression analysis shows that analyzing internal migration flows in Namibia without accounting for distance-related differences in migrant motivations may produce misleading results.Disaggregation of migration flows by distance reveals that for both the entire population and the restricted African-language speaking sample, constituency differences in amenity quality are significant predictors of intermediate-distance migration volumes. Per capita income differences in favour of the receiving constituency increase long-distance migration volumes. For all distances, previous migration in the sending constituency is a strong positive predictor of migration volumes.

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