KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS), 1993 - 1998

The purpose of the survey was to collect hard statistical information about the conditions under which South Africans live in order to provide policy makers with the data required for planning strategies to implement such goals as those outlines in the Government of National Unity's Reconciliation and Development Programme (RDP) (1993 codebook). An important adjunct of apartheid has been the absence of credible and comprehensive data on which policy, such as poverty reduction strategies, can be grounded. The previous regime had little interest in collection information of this nature and, indeed, often surpassed data that depicted conditions in the former bantustan areas. This automatically excluded a large proportion of the poor from official statistics. It was not until the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) that a comprehensive household database for development was created. Despite its usefulness, a cross-sectional study such as the PSLSD is unable to address a variety of questions, particularly those concerning dynamic processes, important to policy researchers and practitioners. KIDS 1993 - 1998 is a new longitudinal household survey based on the PSLSD that begins to fill this gap