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?
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
The South African dream is that opportunities should not be defined by initial conditions, be they race, gender or class. The Constitution provides the right to education as an important foundational element of reaching this dream. Government has developed an important set of initiatives aimed at improving the school readiness of children, thus potentially providing a fair start for all South Africans. Questions, however, remain as to whether these initiatives will be able to rectify past...
Richard Pithouse -
Governments around the world tend to force poor people off well located and therefore valuable urban land and into peripheral ghettoes. From New Orleans to Bombay and Johannesburg the story is the same.
One motivation for this is to transfer valuable land from the poor to the rich to create a subsidy for elite development at the direct expense of the poor. A useful secondary consequence of this for many governments is that people living outside of state control can be forced to...
Stephen Greenberg -
Rural development was identified as one of the top five priorities for the next five years at the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) Conference in Polokwane in December 2007. This will be translated into the ANC’s 2009 election manifesto to be launched in January. But will this lead to practical changes in the ANC’s approach to rural areas since 1994?
The historical roots of the ANC lie in the urban areas. The organisation first represented an aspirant urban...
Glenn Ashton -
This year is the first that school students – or learners as they are now known - are to matriculate under the new Outcomes Based Educational system. OBE was adopted as one of the first major policy innovations under the newly democratic government in South Africa, under the ideological guidance of the first minister of education, Sibusiso Bengu.
The demand to meaningfully change the educational system in South Africa was a priority intervention. The old system, irrevocably...
Richard Pithouse -
Shack fires burn hot and fast. It’s not always easy to predict their speed and direction because as paraffin stoves explode in large balls of flame fires can suddenly jump ahead or to the side.
In most settlements the number of taps is entirely inadequate for people to be able to try and put the flames out on their own. Usually the only viable strategy to fight shack fires is to demolish a ring of shacks around the fire and let it burn itself out. But when the wind is...
Isobel Frye -
South Africa has arguably one of the most extensive social security systems amongst developing countries. Currently just over 12 million people receive some form of social assistance grant, and in addition we have a number of social insurance schemes, including the Unemployment Insurance Fund and private pension and provident funds which together form a social security system.
The main historical objective of social security is to secure people against vulnerability which arises as a...
