Identifying the changes in the quality of life of Southern African Development Community (SADC) migrants in South Africa from 2001 to 2011

Abstract

Worldwide people migrate to improve their quality of life (QOL). This article determines whether the QOL of Southern African Development Community (SADC) migrants in South Africa has improved or deteriorated from 2001 to 2011. Variables pertaining to several dimensions of QOL (socio-economic characteristics, housing conditions, ownership of household goods and service delivery) were extracted from Census unit records, after which percentages were calculated and then standardized by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation. A factor analysis was then performed to determine the most important variables influencing the QOL of SADC migrants. Lastly, a mixed-model repeated-measures ANOVA was calculated, using the province and year as fixed effects, and municipalities as random effects, to assess whether statistically significant changes had occurred. Findings show an improvement in the socio-economic and service delivery dimensions of QOL for SADC migrants in South Africa as a whole from 2001 to 2011, but housing conditions had deteriorated, while the ownership of household goods remained relatively unchanged. However, the Western Cape is the only province where SADC migrants experienced an exceptional deterioration of most QOL dimensions. Some aspects to consider to improve the QOL of the SADC migrants are discussed.

Keywords:

• SADC migrants in South Africa
• changes in quality of life (QOL)
• socio-economic dimension of QOL
• housing conditions dimension of QOL
• ownership of household goods dimension of QOL
• service-delivery dimension of QOL

Acknowledgements

The authors would like thank Sive Sithole from Statistics South Africa for extracting the 2001 and 2011 Census unit records from Super-Cross, the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions to improve this article, and Professor Martin Kidd for calculating the factor analysis and mixed-model repeated-measures ANOVAs in this article.

Notes

1. Please note that it was not possible to obtain information pertaining to the reasons why SADC migrants came to South Africa. The implications mentioned here are thus possible attempts to link the migration and mobility transition theories to the results obtained in the study.