The crisis of South Africa’s missing dads
September 14, 2025
“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).
