Factors influencing asset accumulation among rural households in South Africa: towards asset-based resilience

Many rural households in South Africa are involved in subsistence agriculture. These subsistence households are characterized by poor asset endowment while they play an important role in poverty alleviation, especially in rural areas. Many poverty-reduction policies have been primarily focused on income poverty, ignoring other aspects of poverty that have overshadowed rural households. This study therefore constructed a household composite asset index using the Multiple Correspondence Analysis technique to weigh asset indicators and analysed the factors influencing asset accumulation in rural South Africa. In particular, we examined the effects of household participation in subsistence farming on asset accumulation. This is particularly important in rural households, where asset ownership plays a vital role in maintaining a satisfactory level of consumption in the face of adverse income shocks and attaining well-being. The study used the data from South Africa's 2018 General Household Survey (GHS), undertaken by Statistics South Africa and a sub-sample of rural dwellers was used. The ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation results revealed that participation in subsistence farming, household size, income, the primary source of income, gender, and age of the household head significantly influences households’ asset accumulation and are statistically significant. The robustness of the results was tested by estimating an ordered multinomial logit model and the findings are consistent across the two empirical approaches.