More than 30-million South Africans are languishing in poverty, the Poverty Trends in South Africa report released by Statistician-General Pali Lehohla on Tuesday showed.

“When you look at economic growth, you can see that our target is 5.4 percent per year, but that the growth is not going in that direction. We have had two quarters of negative growth – which is a technical recession. We do know that unemployment is very high and we have seen that in our quarterly labour force survey,” Lehohla said as he addressed a media briefing in Pretoria.

“We know that the number of the unemployed has increased, of course, against a growing population. The number of the unemployed has actually grown quite dramatically. If we were to measure the unemployment from 2008 to 2017, the likelihood of staying unemployed has increased by 10 percentage points. So there is no end in sight, in relation to that [which] society is [experiencing], and this applies to quarter two of 2017.”

Lehohla said the South African economic sectors’ absorption capacity for the unemployed millions had shrunk significantly.

“We have never gone back to the absorption levels of before 2008, showing that in terms of employment, we are facing very serious problems,” he said.

StatSA said poverty increased to 55.5 percent – that is 30.4-million people – in 2015.

“The number of persons living in extreme poverty, that is persons living below the 2015 food poverty line of R441 per person per month in South Africa increased by 2.8-million, from 11-million in 2011 to 13.8-million in 2015.

The report also showed that the most vulnerable to poverty in South African society were children aged 17 or younger, women, black Africans, people living in rural areas, people residing in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces, and people with little or no education.

The Poverty Trends in South Africa report released on Tuesday is titled “An examination of absolute poverty between 2006 and 2015”.

Poverty estimates are essential for monitoring and tracking progress towards achieving the poverty targets outlined in government’s National Development Plan (NDP) and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.