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?
The world faces two problems in education, says Vikas Pota, chief executive of The Varkey GEMS Foundation. One is that there are many children, about 57 million, who are not at school. The bigger crisis, however, is the fact that there are hundreds of millions of children who are at school, but who aren’t learning anything.
The Varkey GEMS Foundation conducted a global study to find out how to improve the quality of teachers in the classroom. Overall they found that solving the...
On a trip to Palestine and Israel this week, French president Francois Hollande said that “Palestinians should give up on the right of return of Palestinian refugees or become flexible on the right of return” in exchange for Israel to stop building settlements in occupied Palestine.
Talking about the kind of mindset that France is adopting in relation to its foreign policy, Sher Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center, a Palestinian-Israeli...
Frank Meintjies -
How does one make sense of the injustice of Johannesburg’s “clean sweep” campaign? In the name of cleaning up the streets of downtown Johannesburg, thousands of street traders have had their stalls demolished in recent days. The lack of strong or widespread objection from the public and urban planners in response to this merciless act by the authorities is remarkable. Perhaps more disappointing is the lack of solidarity action on the part of civil society organisations....
South Korea is planning to implement a new bill that would regulate video games as a controlled substance, like drugs or alcohol. According to government data, 11% of Korean youth and 6% of adults are addicted to the Internet, and 61% of those addicts use the web for online gaming. Many argue that authorities have drawn the wrong conclusion from this data and fail to see what might have caused the addiction in the first place.
Korea’s gaming bill is backed by fifteen...
Lucy McKeon -
Confronting the national past—an important and ongoing exercise for any nation—is especially fraught for a country like Germany, whose recent pasts perhaps more urgently beg for confrontation than most. And so it is that Germany is known for its formalized memorialization of these regretted pasts, in the form of museums, monuments, exhibitions and tours. (One current debate in Berlin centers on whether Tempelhof Field, a former Nazi airport-turned-park, should remain undeveloped...
Gillian Schutte & Sipho Singiswa -
Oppression, when written about, is often reduced to one layer of suffering. Yet when one unpacks the lives and narratives of the poor it becomes clear that their struggle to survive takes place under many layers of oppression.
Layer One: The History of Racial Oppression
The most obvious layer of oppression is that of a history of colonialism, labour and apartheid. Colonialists created ‘race’ as a way of oppressing the colonised. This race construct was created on the...
