Keyword: poverty

Unemployment: South Africa's 'Ticking Time Bomb'

Video Rising unemployment in South Africa is spelling disaster for the country's black population, reports Al Jazeera, as it highlights the prevalence of unemployment amongst youth both with and without educational qualifications. According to Al Jazeera, a recent study claims more than half of black youths do not have a job, a situation which the government refers to as a "ticking time bomb."

Nic Dawes: The Media Is Pretty Bad at Covering the Economy, But...

Video Nic Dawes, Editor in Chief of the Mail & Guardian newspaper speaking about how the media reports on the economy in South Africa. Dawes delivered this presentation at a roundtable discussion co-hosted by SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung South Africa Office (FES). Dawes started of by saying that the media is not very good at covering the economy. He conceded that there are indeed deficiencies in how the media treats issues that relate to the lives of the poor and the policies...

Does Poverty Rise as Biodiversity Falls?

Video There is a strong link between biodiversity and poverty argues, economist, Pavan Sukhdev, head of the United Nations (UN) Green Economy Initiative. The typical view taken is that it's a choice. You can have biodiversity or you can have poverty. You can have development or you can have nature, but not both.  This is false thinking, contends Sukhdev, as it is not the case that biodiversity is just the preserve of the rich.  Biodiversty is valuable to everyone, but is an absolute...

Americans Desperate for Public Housing

Video A report that highlights the desperation of poor Americans. According to this MSNBC report, last week 30,000 people turned up close to the city of Atlanta just to get an application form for public housing. People queued for hours in extremely hot weather, some passing out from heat exhaustion, simply for the opportunity to get onto the public housing waiting list. Notwithstanding the humiliation of having to wait for hours to collect application forms from a clearly disorganized housing...

South Africa: A Far Cry from the Marvel of the World Cup

Picture: Frames-of-mind Dale T. McKinley - It didn’t take long did it? Despite the lingering stupor, just a month after the end of the constructed mega-hype of the Soccer World Cup, South Africa is firmly back in the reality trenches. With intensified public attention on important social and economic issues/debates, a host of strikes and re-energised political faction fighting taking centre stage, it seems an apt time to critically redirect some of the fading winter sunlight onto the political, economic and social state of the...

Does Corruption Create Poverty?

Picture: www.unodc.org Walden Bello - The issue of corruption resonates in developing countries. In the Philippines, for instance, the slogan of the coalition that is likely to win the 2010 presidential elections is "Without corrupt officials, there are no poor people." Not surprisingly, the international financial institutions have weighed in. The World Bank has made "good governance" a major thrust of its work, asserting that the "World Bank Group focus on governance and anticorruption (GAC) follows...