Eighty20 Township markets: A high level review 2007

     According to the Neighbourhood Development Partnership Grant at Treasury (www.treasury.gov.za/ndp) a Township is an underdeveloped residential area reserved for non-whites created during apartheid.

They are characterized by:

•   Low levels of community facilities & commercial investment
•   Low household incomes & poverty, slower household income growth
•   Large concentrations of poor households
•   High levels of unemployment
•   Under-performing residential property markets (dead capital)
•   Limited income retention of income (75+% leakage of local buying power)
•   Undiversified and marginal local economies
•   Considerable fiscal burden

     While it may be possible to identify and analyse the characteristics of specific areas using 2001 Census data it becomes more difficult to do so using recent survey data. Given that we are primarily interested in a current view of township life, we have chosen to sacrifice accuracy of geography in favour of currency of data. We have therefore had to develop various proxies to identify townships in the source surveys – which include the 2006 Labour Force Survey (LFS), the 2006 General Household Survey (GHS), the All Media and Product Survey (AMPS) from 2007 and FinScopeTM 2006. Some of these surveys contain data to a magisterial district level (GHS and LFS) or identify urban or rural areas (AMPS uses community size while FinScopeTM assigns a rural / urban status to specific respondents).