This study uses the bioecological framework and methodology to select items for and to test a multidimensional structure of a measure of children’s economic well-being in a multi-community sample of children (7–11 years) and their households (N = 1958) from KwaZulu-Natal, a poor and under-served region of South Africa. Economic well-being was assessed using questionnaires completed by children’s caregivers and household heads. Exploratory factor analysis of four random split halves identified three dimensions of economic well-being: Fiscal Appraisal (subjective experiences of access to/allocation of resources), Material Assets (durable goods and living environment), and Fiscal Capacity (traditional measures of poverty: income, expenditures, employment). Confirmatory factor analysis verified the higher order model of economic well-being with the three dimensions. Invariance testing using multiple group factor analysis indicated confidence for use of this measure with varying types of communities in South Africa. The results reflect the multidimensional nature of economic well-being. Thus, the often-used money metric measures of poverty likely paint an incomplete picture of children’s actual economic well-being. Because our sample consists of impoverished households, our measure of economic well-being is sensitive to variation at the deep end of poverty. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

The South African government offers three main services to improve the developmental potential and overall well-being of the country's children: cash grants, health care, and education. There is research to suggest that receiving supports to the household in multiple domains simultaneously might improve children's development over and above improvements to development that are typically experienced when receiving a single developmental support, however, no research to date has empirically examined the patterns by which these services may be received, the associated quality of these services, the multilevel characteristics of children and their households that might predict receiving particular patterns of services, or the relationship between service receipt and children's academic and cognitive development in a natural (non-experimental) environment in South Africa. This paper uses three-step latent class analysis to explore patterns of receipt of the three primary government-provided services, the child-, caregiver-, household-, and community-level factors that predict receipt of these patterns, and the associations between service receipt patterns and the academic and cognitive outcomes of low-income 7–10year old children living in peri-urban and rural regions of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, while accounting for potential sources of selection bias. Results revealed three service receipt patterns: primarily education, primarily cash grants and education, and all three services, showed that household level factors were most predictive of service receipt such that the most economically disadvantaged households were likely to receive the most services, and found that children receiving more services had poorer math outcomes as compared to children receiving fewer services.