Poverty has always been studied in a world of certainty. However, if the aim of studying poverty is not only improving the well-being of households who are currently poor, but also preventing people from becoming poor in the future, a new forward looking perspective must be adopted. For thinking about appropriate forward-looking anti-poverty interventions (i.e. interventions that aim to prevent or reduce future poverty rather than alleviate current poverty), the critical need then is to go beyond a cataloging of who is currently poor and who is not, to an assessment of households’ vulnerability to poverty. This study analyses a panel dataset on a representative sample of 150 rural households interviewed in 2007 and 2008 in the Amathole District... |