The Programme to Support Pro-poor Policy Development (PSPPD) is a partnership between the Presidency of South Africa and the European Union (EU). The PSPPD aims to promote evidence-based policy and public policy interventions which address poverty and inequality and contribute towards achieving the economic and social development goals of South Africa.
The purpose of the Programme is to develop a cadre of researchers and policy-makers with a deeper understanding of household dynamics and poverty to enable more informed evidence-based policy-making.
The PSPPD is a complementary programme to the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), a South African panel study. The NIDS dataset is being used to further build the evidence-base in policy relevant research.
The key stakeholders of the PSPPD are policy-makers and researchers from government, as well as social researchers and academics from higher education institutions. Read more about our
partners below.
The Programme has four main components
- Research - The Programme undertook a call for proposals in 2009 and awarded 13 research grants to the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and nine universities. The grant topics range from education and health, to child poverty and crime, among others, and many of the research projects are using the NIDS first survey round (Wave 1) dataset. The Programme has also commissioned research papers which analyse the NIDS Wave 1 dataset in the areas of education, health, migration and labour market dynamics.
To read research outputs from commissioned researchers go to the Research Evidence section.
- Learning and capacity building - This component of the Programme provides learning intervention opportunities to improve skills and capacity among policy-makers and researchers in producing evidence-based policy and conceptualising, planning and implementing interventions around poverty. This has included training workshops, study tours and exchange programmes, as well as conferences such as the Overcoming Inequality and Structural Poverty in South Africa conference in September 2010.
- Knowledge management - The Programme is actively involved in the documenting of evidence and the sharing of information around evidence-based policy through seminars and workshops, newsletters, and support of the Policy>Action Network (P>AN).
- Support to the government’s M&E system - Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a key area for evidence-based policy-making and recognising its importance, government has created a Department of Performance M&E (DPME) in the Presidency. The PSPPD has provided a wide range of support to the DPME for the development of systems and guidelines, funding of a scoping study into forms of community-based monitoring and accountability, and the development and application of the outcomes approach.