The Economist: The crisis of South Africa’s missing dads

Key topics:Fatherlessness fuels social and economic struggles in South AfricaCultural and economic barriers hinder fathers’ active involvementNGOs promote positive masculinity and new fatherhood role models.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.“The child faces a void without his father,” Victor Pike tells a room full of men in Khayelitsha, a poor part of Cape Town. The audience nods along as the community worker from Father A Nation, an NGO, espouses a “positive masculinity” whereby absent dads take more responsibility. “The reason why our nation is broken is because there are no fathers there; we are fatherless.”Uniquely so: South Africa is the only one of 43 countries analysed by the Institute for Family Studies, an American think-tank, in which less than half of children live with both parents. Today in South Africa just 36% of children—and 31% of black children—live with their biological dads, a ten-percentage-point decline since the end of white rule in the mid-1990s (see chart)..Growing up without a father is associated with bad outcomes, from poor school results to later joblessness and criminality. The poorest kids are the most likely to lack dads at home, so it is hard to parse correlation and causation. But common sense—and every social worker your correspondent interviewed—suggests that life chances are better when dads are around..Read more:.Breaking the chains: South Africa’s economic struggle goes beyond race.Yet as well as being a source of South Africa’s social ills, absent fathers are also a result of them. Fatherlessness reflects how history and culture interact with a stagnant economy. Under apartheid black men were all but forcibly recruited from rural areas to work in mines and other industries, then housed in all-male hostels. Their families were forced to stay behind. Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, Desmond Tutu made a point of calling apartheid “this cancer, eating away at the vitals of black family life”.In Khayelitsha Mr Pike tells the men that he saw his father, who toiled in a gold mine, only five days a year. Several attendees say that their father never came home. One wells up recalling how friends would tease him at Christmas for receiving no gifts.Yet why has the fatherless trend worsened since the end of apartheid? In part this is because while politics underwent a revolution in the 1990s, South Africa’s economic structure did not. Old patterns die hard.Another part of the explanation, though, may lie in how women have found it financially easier to live apart from their kids’ fathers. The end of apartheid’s restrictions on movement led to more women seeking work. Their share in the labour force has risen from 40% to 55%. The gender pay gap narrowed in the 20 years after 1994 and nearly closed among the lowest paid. Child-support grants, a welfare benefit, add a little extra money.In South Africa men and women typically see the father as a provider, not a carer. One sociological study notes that men call themselves “ATM fathers”. Cultural norms reflect and reinforce this identity. The practice of lobola, sometimes translated as “bride price”, requires the man to pay a sum—originally in cattle, now in money—to the woman’s family before marriage. Men who have a child out of wedlock must pay inhlawulo (“damages”) before they gain parental rights.For fathers who want to play more active roles in their kids’ lives these practices act as barriers to entry—barriers that have in effect become higher since the 1990s. Most black men are without work or eke out a living in the informal economy. The overall unemployment rate has risen from 20% in 1994 to 33%. “Our community expects us to be super-heroes” by thinking we can earn enough, sighs another participant in Mr Pike’s session.Fatherlessness does not mean women are bringing up children alone. Among black South Africans, who make up 82% of the population, extended families have become more common. They account for 66% of black households, while just 21% are nuclear. Among whites the shares are reversed, with 71% living in nuclear families and 19% in extended ones. How much this reflects longstanding cultural preferences or economic pressures is hard to say (affluent black families are more likely to be nuclear). Regardless, children are not branches of family trees but of canopies.Though aunties and grandmothers are crucial to raising kids, other men matter, too. Since 2010, more children have lived with an adult male other than their father than with their biological fathers. This group of mothers’ partners, uncles, grandparents or siblings are known as “social fathers”.Some studies point to a link between child abuse and growing up in a household with a man who is not your father. Yet many social fathers are benign influences. The State of South Africa’s Fathers (SOSAF), a report released last year, found that nearly a third of social fathers help with homework and read books to kids. Social fathers help financially as well. An earlier SOSAF report gives an example of one man, Yanga, whose monthly income of 15,000 rand ($655 in today’s money) helps support the two biological children he raises at home with his wife, her other child (who also lives with them), his child from a previous relationship (who does not) and two nephews.In 2023 Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, said that “the challenge of absentee fathers is one of the greatest tragedies of our nation.” But his government has not done much about it. So as is often the case in South Africa, civil society picks up the pieces.Father A Nation is one of several NGOs trying to change men’s ways. Others run “play workshops” and provide mentors. Heartlines, another NGO, runs a coaching service for dads via WhatsApp.It has also produced a short film, “Playing Dad”, in which an aloof old-school father finds himself in charge of his son—one of several examples of efforts to use media to influence views of what it means to be a man and a father. Kwanda Ndoda of DG Murray Trust, a foundation, has made a documentary about black male childcare workers. “If children see males in positions of care they will be less likely to grow up thinking that caring is only done by women.” Sesame Workshop, the non-profit arm of Sesame Street, has developed a new puppet, Zikwe: a taxi driver who has to look after his sister’s triplets after she gets a job in another city.What impact these efforts will have is unclear. A viral TikTok video from two years ago, in which a boy promises to neglect his own child like his father neglected him, hints at the huge challenge. But in Khayelitsha Mr Pike is undeterred and his audience is listening. He ends with a prayer, asking for God’s help so “that we don’t commit or repeat the mistakes of our fathers.”

The Economist: The crisis of South Africa’s missing dads

Key topics:

From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com

© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

The Economist

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