As the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa’s successes and failures spill over into the broader region. Today, as South Africans face high unemployment and a sluggish economy, policymakers are wrestling to create success through solutions that will quell rising public debt, overcome persistent inequality, and stimulate regional economic integration. But a deficit of data that can inform whole–system answers threatens to impede policies that lead to inclusive...

In order to reduce poverty you must be able to measure it. It sounds so obvious, but in my experience policy makers think that measuring poverty is either a completely ‘objective’ process, like measuring the temperature in the room, or a broadly flexible exercise that can easily be manipulated to obtain the desired outcomes. And even when the same approach to poverty measurement is used, significant differences remain in the actual process of poverty estimation. As an example,...