The impact of poverty on basic education in South Africa: A systematic review of literature

In this chapter, we examine how poverty has impacted upon basic education in post-apartheid South Africa. Our position is that without rooting out poverty, South Africa's very noble transformation agenda for society in general and education in particular, may not come to fruition. After all, education is the major instrument of such transformation. Education has great potential to drastically reduce or even eradicate poverty, but poverty can drastically reduce one's success in education. The knowledge gap we saw was that while post-apartheid South Africa has made tremendous strides in fighting poverty in education, the impact thereof is not sufficiently evident. Through a three-stage systematic literature review process, we settled for and discussed seven themes: poverty and reading achievement, poverty and school dropout, poverty and returns to schooling, poverty and the post-apartheid education policy landscape, poverty as a categoriser of schools, poverty and the implementation of inclusive education, and lastly, poverty as a trigger for self-emancipation. We conclude that poverty remains a great enemy to South Africa's educational aspirations. While reading literacy is the backbone of all learning, sadly, due to poverty, many learners are unable to achieve such foundation. Some of the country's otherwise well-meaning landmark education policies are difficult to implement fully in poor contexts. Thus, poverty has rendered the same previously disadvantaged communities to be at risk. In the latter communities, education is inevitably of low quality. Low-quality education has a negative ripple effect on the employability of students therefrom. We recommend that the struggle should be two-pronged: fighting poverty on one hand, and crafting and implementing ways to improve the quality of education on the other. In that struggle, schools and communities need to drastically shift from deficit to assetbased thinking and doing.