SALDRU celebrates 50 years since its founding in 1975

SALDRU at 50: “Now we are a bus”

Professor David Lam of the University of Michigan first met Francis Wilson, founder and director of the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit, in Cape Town in 1996. He had come to talk to him about some of the seminal data collections SALDRU had pioneered exploring living standards and poverty. As he waited for him on the porch of a guesthouse, a sleek Mercedes pulled up and a besuited man emerged. ‘This must be the famous professor’ he thought. He was wrong. A few minutes later, Wilson arrived “in a rusty old mini”, bounded out, bundled Lam and his wife Tina into the tiny car and drove them to SALDRU’s then offices on the Hiddingh campus in town.

They immediately “hit it off” with a shared passion to make the data collected for the Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) publicly available to help guide policy in the new democratic government. At the SALDRU at 50 event on Wednesday 10^th December, Lam was one of the speakers on three panels that spanned SALDRU’s history. 

The day was comprised of three segments: an appreciation event in anticipation of the retirement of SALDRU’s long-serving former Director Professor Murray Leibbrandt, the 50^th anniversary of SALDRU, and the Francis Wilson Memorial Lecture which was delivered by Leibbrandt later that evening.

Lam returned to SALDRU in the early 2000s and was struck by how the research had expanded. Now SALDRU was engaged in one of the first longitudinal panel studies of its kind, the Cape Areas Panel Study (CAPS), and was about to launch a critical national study in partnership with government, The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS). “The mini had evolved into a mini-van,” said Lam. “A bit upgraded, bigger, it could hold the whole family but still modest and efficient and reliable. Now with Murray at the wheel, who occasionally had to gently and firmly scold the kids in the back to settle down.”

About 100 people attended the afternoon-long session after Leibbrandt’s retirement function to hear 15 speakers speak about what SALDRU had meant to their careers and to policy development in the country.

Lindy Wilson, who described herself as “married to SALDRU”, said Francis had taken four years to persuade the Economics department to set up a research unit. “He knew the value of research… as a tool for exposing apartheid. This would be Francis’ hallmark in whatever he wrote and whenever he spoke,” she said.

Francis had made pathbreaking findings in his PhD in 1967 about black mineworkers on the goldmines by combing through 55 years of Chamber of Mines annual reports. He discovered that not only had their wages not gone up – they had in fact gone down in real terms. Moreover, the racial wage gap had widened.

“Facts are powerful,” he said often. “Facts matter.”

It was a lesson that has marked SALDRU’s history.

When Debbie Budlender first encountered SALDRU, it was because the late Dudley Horner became an unofficial supervisor of her Honours thesis. (Wilson was the official supervisor). When she was banned for her work in the union movement at the end of 1976, her banning order specifically prohibited her from any contact with SALDRU. “I was probably the only person banned from SALDRU,” she recalled. “My other claim to fame was that I brought the first personal computer into SALDRU and wrote a programme to analyse wages.”

Image: Lindy Wilson speaking on the first panel. From left to right: Lindy Wilson, Pippa Green, Debbie Budlender, Najwah Allie-Edries. Credit: SALDRU. 

The day her banning order was lifted, Dudley Horner invited her to come work at SALDRU and she began (with Gordon Young) the Labour Research Service, offering advice to nascent trade unions and researching wage determinations and industrial council agreements to support them in negotiations.

Najwah Allie-Edries, another panellist, was employed early in SALDRU’s history as an intern. She was the first in her family to attend a university – her mother had worked in a garment factory since the age of 11. “SALDRU was my safe landing,” she said.  “It was an anchor in a time of great uncertainty in our country when access to opportunities was limited and support very scarce…SALDRU gave me not just a place to work and study but a community that believed in young people from under-represented backgrounds.”

SALDRU began its journey by exposing – through research – the inequities of apartheid. It ran the Farm Labour Conference and the seminal second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty in 1982, which produced some 400 papers, many of which became part of a book. The Inquiry also produced films and a photographic book edited by renowned documentary photographer Omar Badsha. It also brought Dr Mamphela Ramphele into SALDRU’s fold. In a recorded video message she told how Wilson had rescued her from the remote rural area in the then northern Transvaal to which she had been banished by the apartheid government and “taught me how to write” so she could co-author the Uprooting Poverty book with him.

The transitional years before democracy and its first 20 years saw a marked shift in focus from “exposing the facts of poverty under apartheid – to actively generating the data itself,” as Cally Ardington, the director of DataFirst and convenor of the second panel noted.

Trevor Manuel, panellist, former finance minister and minister of Planning in the Presidency, recalled how the head of the World Bank had come to South Africa in 1991 and met with Mandela and some of his colleagues. “The one thing we didn’t want was money,” he said. But what “opened the door to this engagement” was the fact that there were no reliable census statistics. The old Central Statistical Services had simply excluded the “independent” homelands from their population surveys and done rudimentary aerial flyovers to estimate the black population in the urban areas.

Image: Trevor Manuel speaking on the second panel. From left to right: Cecil Mlatsheni, Mastoera Sadan, Trevor Manuel, Cally Ardington, David Lam, James Levinsohn. Credit: SALDRU.

An engagement with SALDRU led to the first integrated household survey in South Africa – the PSLSD – with support from the World Bank. The country needed a baseline, he said, especially as the incoming government was about to launch the RDP. It was an opportunity to “indigenise” the data. 

Jim Levinsohn, also on that panel and the Dean of the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale, confirmed how upset Wilson was that until then the only person who had written about the data SALDRU had collected “was a French student in Boston” (she turned out to be Esther Duflo who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019).

From this period, the partnerships that SALDRU forged with international institutions helped support training programmes, particularly for young black economists, to analyse the data collected in the household surveys. 

There was also a new push to engage government in partnerships to use research in policymaking. Mastoera Sadan of the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation recalled how because of “basic leadership and foresight” in the Presidency, new programmes such as one to support “Pro-Poor Policy Development” began active partnerships with SALDRU to use its research to inform policy.

Perhaps the best example of this was the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), begun in 2008. A longitudinal study encompassing about 28 000 individuals and more than 7 000 households, it did what even a good census could not do: it tracked mobility of individuals across waves: movements into and out of poverty and into and out of employment.

Cecil Mlatsheni, an associate professor in the School of Economics, also a panellist, and an investigator in the CAPS project and in NIDS, said “CAPS was a true panel survey of young people. Something like that was not around at the time… It was exciting and gave us a lot to work with, like answering questions about transitions from school into work.”

Image: Ariane De Lannoy chairing the third panel. From left to right: Rudi Dicks, Murray Leibbrandt, Anda David, Ariane De Lannoy, Imraan Patel, Nicola Branson, Josh Budlender. Credit: SALDRU. 

The final panel of the day, convened by SALDRU’s deputy director, Associate Professor Ariane de Lannoy, dealt with the past decade and SALDRU’s current work.

Facts still matter as much as they did in the early days, but the work has a more practical bent. For instance, as Nicola Branson - a Chief Research Officer in SALDRU - explained, researchers have developed measurement tools such as the Youth Explorer available to a wider community. “Human capital in its broader sense has become an important theme of SALDRU work. So we have Cally [Ardington’s] work on foundational literacy and numeracy, and an understanding of learning losses especially during Covid.” Her own work, with SALDRU post-doctoral researcher Emma Whitelaw, focuses on the post-schooling sector and labour-market absorption – “in a way that’s more detailed and relevant to policy.”

The “Covid moment” was particularly important for SALDRU. Post-doctoral researcher Josh Budlender was part of a SALDRU team that undertook seminal work in analysing the losses to ordinary workers during the lockdown period. The SALDRU group, having been brought into a much broader team and effort, showed that the best way to support unemployed workers and their dependents was through a combination of top-ups to existing grants (such as the child support grant) and new grants targeted at unemployed workers (like the Social Relief of Distress grant).  

The interaction between Treasury and officials in the Presidency – such as Kate Philip of the Presidential Youth Employment Stimulus, was critical. Notions of the “ivory tower” of universities were put aside: “When you get an email from Kate at 2am saying she needs to present data at a cabinet meeting at 10 that morning, you are not going to worry about referencing.” The relationships, built over years, bore fruit. Rudi Dicks of the Presidency recalled how government targeted interventions around the Covid period around “hunger and immediate food needs. It was phenomenal because it showed the ability for research and policy to work together.”

Finally, the panels reflected on SALDRU’s expansion to the rest of the continent. Murray Leibbrandt, former director of SALDRU, called the founding of the African Centre for Excellence in Inequalities Research (ACEIR) a “gloriously serendipitous” moment enabled by work with Anda David of the French Development Agency (AFD). “We started doing training programmes in Ghana – we had built strong relations with researchers around the continent. So then an African alliance of research units was formed... and we said ‘Let’s form a centre of excellence to work on the most pressing issues of the continent.’”

“What makes SALDRU special,” reflected Anda David, “is kindness. I’ve worked with dozens of research units but coming back to SALDRU is like coming home (because of) the amazing support team in administration and project management.”

Facts matter, as do relationships. “SALDRU has always been about people – about trying to make a contribution to the world that we live in and to make it a better place,” said new SALDRU director Professor Vimal Ranchhod in his closing address. It “starts with Francis, and then Murray comes in and makes it bigger, and – using David’s analogy (of progression from an old mini to a mini-van) – now we are a bus.”