The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson, challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
In this funny, stirring TED Talk, he outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. Robinson tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest...
John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt.
A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...
Saliem Fakir -
Living with an electricity monopoly armed with a mandate to provide basic services can be a double-edged sword. If well run and efficient it can be a boon for consumers and the public in general. If poorly and inefficiently run, the aftershocks will hurt your pocket and eat at the tax base for a long time to come.
When a utility company holds a monopoly over power plants, the transmission of electricity and large parts of the distribution network, as South Africa's Eskom does, it pretty...
One billion people go to bed hungry every night and two million children die from malnutrition every year. A high proportion of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, land grabs, food price fixing, commodity trading and the financial crisis all play their part in the food crisis that the world is currently facing. On March 26, the Frontline Club in London hosted a panel of experts to engage with the problem. One thing they agreed on is that there is enough food being produced in the...
Richard Pithouse -
On Friday night Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in a local bar where he was watching a football game on television. It was a well organised hit on a man who had, for years, been at the centre of a local struggle around land and housing - the keenest point of conflict between citizens and the local state – in Cato Crest in Durban.
Qumbelo made a remarkably bold entrance onto the local political stage on Freedom Day in 2005. Thabo Mbeki was set to speak in the King's Park stadium...
Section 27 of the South African Constitution guarantees the right to food. However, if one tracks the impact of inflation on the poor, one finds that their purchasing power is being eroded because the basket of goods on which the CPI is based is determined by the middle class and the elites, argues Isobel Frye, director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII).
Worse, poor South Africans face even greater prejudices. Her organisation's research has found that the goods...
