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This report compares the business operations of over 2,000 South Africans and refugees in the urban informal economy and systematically dispels some of the myths that have grown up around their activities. First, the report takes issue with the perception that South Africans are inexperienced and unmotivated participants in the informal economy. Many have years of experience and have successfully grown their businesses. Second, it contests the view that refugees enjoy a competitive advantage because they come to South Africa with inherent talent and already honed skills. On the contrary, over 80% of those surveyed had no prior informal sector experience and learned their skills on the job and after coming to South Africa. Third, the report shows that there is fierce competition in the urban informal sector between and within the two groups. However, business competition between refugees and South Africans is mitigated by the fact that they tend to dominate different sections of the informal economy with South Africans dominant in the food sector and refugees in the household products and personal services sectors. Finally, the report takes issue with recent arguments that all informal sector businesses are equally at risk from robbery, extortion and other crimes. It shows that South Africans are affected but that refugees are far more vulnerable than their South African counterparts. The report therefore confirms that xenophobia and xenophobic violence are major threats to refugees seeking a livelihood in the informal sector, especially if they venture into informal settlements.
One of the defining characteristics of many large cities in the rapidly urbanizing global South is the high degree of informality of shelter, services and economic livelihoods. It is these dynamic, shifting and dangerous informal urban spaces that refugees often arrive in with few resources other than a will to survive, a few social contacts and a drive to support themselves in the absence of financial support from the host government and international agencies. This report addresses the question of variability in economic opportunity and entrepreneurial activity between urban environments within the same destination country - South Africa - by comparing refugee entrepreneurship in Cape Town, South Africas second largest city, and several small towns in the province of Limpopo. The research shows that refugee entrepreneurial activity in Limpopo is a more recent phenomenon and largely a function of refugees moving from large cities such as Johannesburg where their businesses and lives are in greater danger. The refugee populations in both areas are equally diverse and tend to be engaged in the same wide range of activities. This report shows that different urban geographies do shape the local nature of refugee entrepreneurial economies, but there are also remarkable similarities in the manner in which unconnected refugee entrepreneurs establish and grow their businesses in large cities and small provincial towns.
The primary goal of this study is to present the results of a comprehensive scope of key opportunities and challenges for harnessing migration for inclusive growth and development at the regional level in Southern Africa. The main objectives were as follows: Provide an overview of regional migration stocks and flows identifying regional trends, drivers and impacts from existing research literature and official data; Profile migrant characteristics at the regional level including demographic composition, types of migration and occupational profile; Examine the relevance of multilateral, continental and regional migration instruments, policies, protocols, agreements and forums with a view to identifying actions required to move the regional migration management agenda forward and align with the goal of enhancing migration for inclusive growth and development in Southern Africa; Analyze the key initiatives, opportunities and obstacles to developing a coherent, integrated and rights-regarding approach to migration management including areas of common commitment and ownership, and points of actual and potential conflict and disagreement between states; Conduct a gender analysis of regional migration dynamics including gender dimensions of migration, challenges, dangers and vulnerabilities confronting migrant women and other vulnerable groups, and gender analysis of migration management in Southern Africa; Identify potential programming areas that are weak or underdeveloped.
Debates about international migration in South Africa often centre on the role of international migrant entrepreneurs who are seen to be more successful than their South African counterparts, squeezing them out of entrepreneurial spaces, particularly in townships. This report explores and compares the experiences of international and South African migrant entrepreneurs operating informal sector businesses in Johannesburg.
Zimbabwe has witnessed the rapid expansion of informal cross-border trading (ICBT) with neighbouring countries over the past two decades. Beginning in the mid-1990s when the country embarked on its Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), a large number of people were forced into informal employment through worsening economic conditions and the decline in formal sector jobs. The country's post-2000 economic col-lapse resulted in the closure of many industries and created market opportunities for the further expansion of ICBT. This report, part of SAMP's Growing Informal Cities series, sought to provide a current picture of ICBT in Zimbabwe by interviewing a sample of 514 Harare-based informal entrepreneurs involved in cross-border trading with South Africa.
Parading respectability: The cultural and moral aesthetics of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa is an intimate and incisive portrait of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape of South Africa. Drawing on her own on background as well as her extended research study period during which she became a band member and was closely involved in its day-to-day affairs, the author, Dr Sylvia Bruinders, documents this centuries-old expressive practice of ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by way of a social history of the coloured communities. In doing so, she traces the slave origins of the Christmas Bands Movement, as well as how the oppressive and segregationist injustices of both colonialism and apartheid, together with the civil liberties afforded in the South African Constitution (1996) after the country became a democracy in 1994 have shaped the movement.
Shimmer Chinodya, winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) is one of Zimbabwe's foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity. The first stories, 'Hoffman Street' and 'The Man who Hanged Himself' capture the bewildered innocence of a child's view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as 'Going to See Mr B.V.' provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions founder on a narrow reality. 'Among the Dead' and 'Brothers and Sisters' look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while 'Playing your Cards', 'The Waterfall', 'Strays' and 'Bramson' introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race and morality come to the fore. Finally, in 'Can we Talk' we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation. Can we Talk and Other Stories speaks of the unspoken and unsaid. The child who watches but does not understand, the young man who observes but cannot participate, the man who stands outside not sure where his desires and ambitions lead, the older man, estranged by his own choices. 'Can we Talk' is not a question but a statement that insists on being heard, and demands a reassessment of our dreams.
For the past two decades, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been the dominant paradigm in water resources. This book explores how ideas of IWRM are being translated and adapted in Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Grounded in social science theory and research, it highlights the importance of politics, history and culture in shaping water management practices and reform, and demonstrates how Africa has clearly been a laboratory for IWRM. While a new cadre of professionals made IWRM their mission, we show that poor women and men may not have always benefitted. In some cases IWRM has also offered a distraction from more critical issues such as water and land grabs, privatisation, the negative impacts of water permits, and a range of institutional ambiguities that prevent water allocations to small and poor water users. By critically examining the interpretations and challenges of IWRM, the book contributes to improving water policies and practices and making them more locally appropriate in Africa and beyond.
Today's Islamists are not a reproduction of an ancient legacy, but are modern political actors defined by modern discourses, argues Basheer Nafiin The Islamists. He examines the emergence and development of political Islam in the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussing the historical context within which political Islam arose, and relating it to the social movements and political parties that lead the phenomenon today. On questions concerning the state, economics and law, the differences among Islamists are no less than their agreements. Nafit eases out some of these agreements and differences relating to governance, citizenship, pluralism, unity, revivalism, and truth. This very accessible work, intended for both an academic and general audience, highlights these matters by examining the groups and individuals that constitute the broad category of political Islam, considering how they have developed over time, and how they have impacted on the countries in which they operate.
Political parties and the party system that underpins South Africa's democracy have the potential to build a cohesive and prosperous nation. But in the past few years the ANC's dominance has strained the system and tested it and its institutions' fortitude. There are deeper issues of accountability that often spurn the Constitution and there is also a clear need to foster meaningful public participation and transparency. This volume offers a different and detailed assessment of the health of South Africa's political system. This study intends to unravel the condition of the party system in South Africa and culminates in the question: Do South African parties promote or hinder democracy in the country? The areas of the party system that are known to require continued work are the weakness of democratic structures within parties, the perceived lack of responsibility of elected parliamentarians towards voters, non-transparent private partner financing structures and a lack of attractiveness of party-political commitment, especially for women. Experts in the respective fields address all of these areas in this book.
It has been long overdue to address the principal problems that Africa continues to have. How to bring real African solutions to these problems remains unresolved. Palaeontologists have discovered that Africa is the origin of humanity. Africa has also experienced the commodification of its humanity through slavery, colonialism and apartheid. The African continent has been influenced by a mélange of races, cultures, religions, ethnic nationalities making the project of how the differences can be managed to forestall conflict and promote the unity of the current 54 states to turn the cacophony of noises into a single voice that can protect Africa a difficult challenge. This book on Regenerating Africa: Bringing African Solutions to African Problems addresses why Africans must come together and try to address their own problems. They must look back to the spiritual, struggle and knowledge heritage to re-imagine and innovate a new Africa with leadership, governance, systems and institutions that can address the security and well-being, the employment, social inclusion, poverty eradication and the equality of the people. In fact the key problem to find a solution is how to Africanise those that originated from Africa and those that became settlers with different racial, cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic variations. How to manage inter-African relations? How the settlers from the colonial legacy, the apartheid legacy, the Arabs in Africa and the varied tribes within Africans can all share being Africanised above all else is a real challenge to bring lasting solutions to Africas enduring problems. This book is one of the few books that addresses the real problems Africa continues to face by suggesting solutions which policy makers and all Africans must learn and never ignore but use to advance a free, united, renascent, proud and dignified independent Africa in this unpredictable time the world is going through. The contributors address in the book how African solutions to African problems in the current global context to create a sustainable African future can be thought, designed and engineered to advance the well-being of people and nature for all. The African Unity for Renaissance series of conferences that over 10 partners contributed to run is the true source for generating the quality papers that have been peer reviewed to constitute the contributions in the book to make African solutions to African problems in reality and not just in talk.
The aim of this book is to better understand the phenomenon of HIV in a country that has faced the fullest might of the disease and yet, after first faltering, has made more progress than any other country in the world in its response to HIV. It aims to reflect the complexity of this narrative and the range of widely differing insights by featuring what is likely the largest number of contributors in a single publication on the subject in South Africa, as well as a full spectrum of specialised areas, ranging from high-end science to personal reflections.
The book examines the nexus between youth conflict and the occult drawing its insights from the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria. It sees the occult represented by the Egbesu deity in this conflict as a form of religious belief imbued in this case with the powers of good. Thus, the religious occult is regenerated and re-energised as an idiom of justice and fairness within the Nigerian state by militant youth fighting the forces of the Nigerian state. Ingeniously, the young men simply dug into the cultural repertoire of the people for a hitherto popular expression of justice and perceived source of potency which they felt would not only provide spiritual protection but also pander to the popular imagination of justice. Even against the background prevalent Christianity, the Egbesu does not generate tension in beliefs but responds to the critical exigency of the immediate socio-political milieu of the people.
Some of the most provocative questions confronting philosophers in Africa are grounded in the historical memory of conquest and the peripheralisation the continent. Mungwini offers a critical reconstruction of indigenous Shona philosophy as an aspect of the African intellectual heritage held hostage by colonial modernity. In this comprehensive work, he lays bare the thoughts of the Shona, who are credited with the founding of the ancient Great Zimbabwe civilisation. Retracing the epistemic thread in the fabric of Shona culture and philosophy, he explores the assumptions that inform their thinking. The exchange of such knowledge is fundamental to the future of humanity.
Dissatisfaction has matured in Africa and elsewhere around the fact that often, the dominant frameworks for interpreting the continents past are not rooted on the continents value system and philosophy. This creates knowledge that does not make sense especially to local communities. The big question therefore is can Africans develop theories that can contribute towards the interpretation of the African past, using their own experiences? Framed within a concept revision substrate, the collection of papers in this thought provoking volume argues for concept revision as a step towards decolonizing knowledge in the post-colony. The various papers powerfully expose that cleansed knowledge is not only locally relevant: it is also locally accessible and globally understandable.
Historically – if one can say that given the infancy of the field – environmental plastic debris has been the baby of marine research. Driven by the rediscovery of long forgotten, 1970s studies on the occurrence of small plastic fragments (today termed microplastics) in the oceans, oceanographers and marine biologists resurrected the topic in the early 2000s. Since then, the field has rapidly expanded and established that plastics are ubiquitous in the marine system, from the Arctic to Antarctic and from the surface to the deep sea. ...