Scenarios for a Poverty Free South Africa

Poverty, inequality, and unemployment (PIU) are persistent problems in South Africa. The dominant view is that these can only be resolved through addressing unemployment. By decoupling unemployment from inequality and poverty, the article challenges the underlying PIU metaphor: unemployment is the linchpin of the South African PIU problem. Four non-collapse scenarios were developed, all of which address poverty. The scenarios were enriched in a future persona workshop and deepened through a Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). The resulting persona and scenario narratives aim to enrich the discourse around addressing the PIU triple crisis.