May 2014

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New Film Exposes Apartheid-Era Working Conditions on Farms that Produce South Africa's Table Grapes

Picture: IRIN Video The Western Cape produces more than 80 percent of South Africa’s table grapes and the Berg and Hex River Valleys are the country's primary production areas. Table grapes are among the world's most traded fruits and the prevailing climatic conditions in these valleys provide an unusually long eight-month window for production. IRIN's latest film, Land of Dust, looks at the conditions of the workers in the Hex River Valley, where long hours, low wages, poor health and education...

Hidden Treasure and the New Colonialism: Why SA Must Protect Its Intellectual Property

Picture: AIDS activists in London demanding an end to big pharma Glenn Ashton - South Africa is about to embark on a radical restructuring of its health industry in order to provide universal access to good medical resources. The astronomical cost of medicine has consistently outstripped inflation. These costs are driven by three primary factors: Firstly the progressively technological nature of intervention, using devices like CAT scans in sophisticated facilities. Secondly, doctors are increasingly specialised and innovative, which raises costs, particularly in...

How Social Media Makes You Lonely

Picture: UCLA Video Loneliness has become the most common ailment of the modern world. One of the possible reasons for this is the online social network. We're collecting friends like stamps and not distinguishing between quantity and quality. We're  exchanging the deep meaning and intimacy of friendship for chats instead of having conversations. By doing so, we're sacrificing conversation for mere connection. And so a paradoxical situation is created in which we claim to have many friends while actually...

The Roots of Nigeria's Chaos

Picture: MSNBC Video N.B. Sensitive viewers are warned that this video contains graphic images. Nigeria has a "voodoo economy" contends Nigerian architect and environmental activist, Nnimmo Bassey. Despite Nigeria’s economy growing at an annual rate of six percent and surpassing South Africa to become the biggest economy in Africa, the country’s wealth is concentrated in a few hands. Seventy percent of Nigerians live in poverty. Inequality and deprivation is most severe in the north of...

NGOs, Productivity, Innovation and Theories of Change

Picture: Life Without Pants Video Most people working in NGOs are driven by passion and a sense of mission. But good motives don’t guarantee good outcomes, argues Dan Corry, chief executive of New Philanthropy Capital in a seminar about non-profits, innovation, productivity and ‘theories of change’ in the UK charity sector. The discussion parallels debates about the effectiveness of South African NGOs. Corry calls for creative destruction to improve productivity and fast track social change. But Vicky...

The Relevance of Thomas Piketty for South Africa: Why Inequality Should Still Be on the Political Agenda

Picture: Thomas Piketty courtesy Salon Magazine Saliem Fakir - The reaction to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was to be expected – both great praise and rejection at the same time. Most studies on inequality, certainly, in the case of South Africa have tended to focus on the middle class, the employed worker and the unemployed through household surveys. What Piketty’s book has done is to argue that economists have been focusing so much on the bottom of the economic pile that we have lost sight of what is...