An important adjunct of apartheid has been the absence of credible and comprehensive data on\nwhich policies, such as poverty reduction strategies, can be grounded. The 1993 Project for\nStatistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) provided the ? rst comprehensive\nhousehold database for South Africa. Despite its usefulness, however, the one round PSLSD\ncannot provide answers to many questions important to policy researchers and practitioners,\nparticularly questions about dynamic processes. The primary objective in this article is to\nintroduce a new longitudinal household database, based on the PSLSD, which begins to ? ll this\ngap. Households surveyed by the PSLSD in KwaZulu-Natal province were re-surveyed in 1998\nby the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Survey (KIDS). As a research endeavour, the KIDS\nproject addresses one of the most vexing and important problems confronting contemporary\nSouth Africa: understanding the forces and mechanisms which contribute to the perpetuation of\napartheid’s legacy of poverty and inequality.\n