The Links Between Migration, Poverty and Health: Evidence From Khayelitsha and Mitchell's Plain

In the mid-1950s, the City of Cape Town was part of a wider area demarcated as a Coloured Labour Preference Area. The free movement of African people into the city was strictly controlled and the residential areas were segregated along racial lines. In terms of Apartheid's grand design, an area designated Mitchell's Plain was demarcated for occupation by Coloured people in 1973 while another designated Khayelitsha was allocated for African people. The two areas were incorporated in one magisterial district, Mitchell's Plain, in the mid-1980s. A sample survey of the area was conducted in late November and early December 2000 with a focus on labour market issues. Its aim was to capture occupants of households aged 18 or older. The survey data has been interrogated to describe the connections between migration, poverty and health in a city where recent rapid urbanisation is changing the demographic profile significantly. As a consequence, the need to provide adequate infrastructure, decent housing and employment poses a daunting challenge ten years after the new democracy has been ushered in.We are deeply indebted to Matthew Welch, deputy-director of the Data First Resource Unit, for so diligently creating the database from the Khayelitsha/Mitchell’s Plain Survey as well as assisting with coding and recoding of certain responses and providing seemingly endless tabulations to enable us to verify the coding which occurred. We acknowledge too the sterling efforts of Jolene Skordis in cutting the initial tables and validating the database as well as Virgulino Nhate who successfully completed his Honours degree in Economics at the University of Cape Town in 2003 and upon whose honours thesis we have drawn extensively although we have used a later version of the database and some alternative questions for analysis. We are very grateful to Alison Siljeur for providing the maps and to Brenda Adams for formatting this paper. Our thanks are also due to Lynn Woolfrey for bibliographical assistance. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided most generously the funds which enabled us to carry out this endeavour. The usual caveats apply