The Amazing Story of SPI

A Passion and a Purpose

18 years ago, on the strength of a verbal promise of funding and a dream, I started a not-for-profit NGO called SPII. The Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute. Looking back to consider the journey, I can say with passion that this journey has been a magnificent one.

“Why a Poverty Institute?” was the questions that I was asked as I went round looking for potential backers back in 2005.

The seeds for an institute that looked specifically at poverty dynamics and the interplay with inequality were sown during the gestation of my daughter. At the time I was working for NALEDI, the research service organisation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

One of the perks of working for a trade union movement was six months’ fully paid maternity leave, but as a result, in the run up to my daughter’s birth, my boss was loath to start me on any new research projects. He told me to find something worthwhile to do, and I picked up the 1845 The Conditions of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels which just happened to be lying around my trade union office.

From Engels I progressed to The Ragged -Trousered Philanthropists, a fictional work by Robert Tressell written some 60 years later. Both works described the misery and drudgery of the working class and the poor in industrialising England. Think Charles Dickens and the poor houses, starving orphans and callous adults - whether thieves or parish councils- these stories and research reports were graphic in their description of destitution and vulnerability in a deeply unequal society.

It has such resonance with the deepening poverty I could see in South Africa. The seemingly hopeless reproduction of poverty that we saw happening, despite the best will in the world in our new democratic dispensation. And it was painful to admit as country that this was happening, because we wanted to repair the damage of the past, and so I think it was easier to ignore it. And we had turned away from redistribution, so the options for remedy or redress were already few.

And then I started reading Seebohm Rowntree’s empirical sociological studies of working- class families in York from 1899. His report, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, introduced the idea that poverty was not due to some pathological weakness or moral failings of a person, or a family, or a region, or by extension, a race. Rowntree used the concept of ‘structural’ drivers of poverty – low wages for a defined group of people, a class in York, who could never accumulate the same education, assets or connections as the middle class and so would always remain trapped in squalor.

That also major resonance for me with the brutality of Apartheid’s stripping away of people’s assets and education and opportunities and connections through forced removals. To eradicate poverty, we needed to go back to the structural drivers and the effect of intergenerational poverty and disempowerment.

And the final prod for me was learning the importance of conceptualising, defining and then measuring poverty. None of these are neutral, but to frame these in a progressive manner you need to have the capacity to contest.

Rowntree developed a poverty line which measured a weekly amount of money that would be needed to keep a working -class family in York with enough food, rent and other basics for a life of some dignity.

And so the next two studies that I produced before going off for maternity leave was a qualitative study of people’s experiences of living in poverty in Joburg, and a political economic review of the various poverty lines in South Africa that existed at that time- mostly set by the Chamber of Mines to determine mineworkers’ wages.

As I sat in the old COSATU House, reading page after page of studies, stories and solutions, I was convinced that this lens of policy study and advocacy was required in South Africa.

And so I started talking to a number of donors to ask if they would support a research advocacy institute on poverty and inequality. The concept was quite novel. Poverty was really still an add- on. Women “and Poverty”. Children “and Poverty”. South Africa was still struggling to overcome the past of racial Apartheid, I was told. Poverty is just too vast.

But the idea would not go away. How could government, with its best intention, think it would solve a crippling ill unless we named it and measured it and measured our own success in defeating it and transforming our society? How could we claim to live in a dignified democracy when we had no idea how many children went to bed hungry, how many adults were unable to buy shoes, how many women had no access to sanitary pads? How could we send young people out to start SMMEs when we did not know the general income levels of the communities that would need to sustain the young entrepreneurs? How could trade unions demand a living wage if we didn’t have agreement on a decent standard of living?

And so with the verbal promises of Gerald Kraak of Atlantic Philanthropies and Zohra Dawood of Open Society Foundation, and a fax machine printer in a spare bedroom in Melville, Joburg, on the day before my daughter was born, SPII was registered as an NPO.

I know that SPII (renamed as the Social Policy Initiative SPI in 2020) has transformed the way that poverty is approached in South Africa. One of the outcomes of our first research project with CASASP, now SASPRI, was the adoption of the three national poverty lines. That gives poverty activists a solid weapon in the war on poverty.

Inspired by the drive for measurement, with the support of the Ford Foundation, we developed a measurement matrix for progressive realisation of Socio-Economic Rights. So when more adults get an income grant, but the amount is not increased for three years, we have a dashboard measure of the multiple dimensions of progressive realisation.

And as a poverty solution, we kept the policy demand going for Universal Basic Income from our inception in 2007 and demanded the introduction of a grant during the Covid- 19 lockdown through NEDLAC that then became the R350 Covid Social Relief of Distress grant.

Possibly always competing with SPII for my attention, my daughter one day exclaimed in irritation: “Well, if there are still so many poor people, then you are clearly not very good at your job, Mom”. Cognitive dissonance. Possibly the dialectic? She was right, but we have indeed made huge progress and have so much to celebrate.

Passion and purpose and professionalism and monetisation. Recently I wrote about Ikigai, which encompasses these four dimensions. I have been so fortunate to have experienced all of these coming together over the last 18 years. Thank you to all who have walked this path with me at SPI.