New partnership hopes to improve access to microcredit in South Africa

A great new partnership between a cosmetic business, an entrepreneurship organization and the website KIVA will work to improve access to microcredit loans for women in South Africa. The skincare product Dermalogica will begin donating a portion of each sale to Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship. FITE will then use the money raised to start a microcredit fund concentrating on women in South Africa. They will also operate a website powered by KIVA, where people can donate additional funds to the women.

From the Inter Press Service, we find out more about the great new service.

Powered by global non-profit micro-lending organisation KIVA, FITE aims to empower women in developed and developing countries worldwide through the provision of micro-loans. Since its official launch in South Africa in February, 30 South African women have been recipients of loans through FITE.

Skincare brand Dermalogica is the founding partner of FITE. "Through the FITE initiative, Dermalogica aims to empower over 25,000 women in business around the world in developing and developed countries in the next two years," said Lauren Michlo, general manager of Dermalogica South Africa.

Each time a consumer buys a specially marked Dermalogica product and enters the code supplied on the packaging into the FITE website, the company makes a one-dollar donation towards the global FITE fund.

The initiative also enables consumers to become direct lenders by making donations in increments of 25 dollars through the FITE website. And the lenders have the power to choose which projects they would like to support by selecting from a list of candidates.

Once the loan has been awarded, lenders are kept up to date on the recipient's progress via e-mails from KIVA. Once a loan has been paid back, that money is put towards a loan for a new recipient. Loan amounts and repayment schedules vary depending on the business plan of individual candidates.

Poor marks for education in South Africa

From IRIN, a story about the struggling education system in South Africa.

Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.

By the age of eight, school children from the most affluent 20 percent of South Africa’s population are already significantly out-performing children from poorer backgrounds, according to new research by the Social Policy Research Group at Stellenbosch University.

The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.

Using newly available data sets, including those linking information on income with numeracy skills, the report analyzed how low-quality tuition in the post-apartheid education system is perpetuating "exclusion and marginalization".

Money not enough

The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.

Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.

South Africa's status as one of the wealthiest countries on the continent has not helped its educational performance - the poorest 25 percent of students ranked 14th out of 15 sub-Saharan countries in reading performance, and 12th for mathematics, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality surveys of 2000 and 2007.

"When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.

Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU), whose nearly 250,000 members make it the country's largest public sector union, said many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.

There are a host of other problems besetting schools in poor areas. According to Yoliswa Dwane, spokesperson for the education advocacy group, Equal Education, over 2,000 schools had no piped water supply, 3,600 lacked electricity, and over 90 percent were without libraries or a functioning laboratory.

Poorly trained teachers

SADTU and other teachers’ unions have opposed national calls for education to become an essential service, which would prevent strike action. In August 2010 a teachers' strike closed schools across the country for three weeks, contributing to a public perception that SADTU and some of its members did not have learners' interests at heart.

"The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."

Many teacher training colleges were closed in the late 1990s after new legislation required them to merge with existing higher education institutions. Plans to transform the training colleges into university-level institutions have not materialized, leaving thousands of teachers without any specialized training.

In recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.

According to the report, insufficient teacher knowledge is a problem, with many teachers scoring poorly in basic reading and mathematics tests.

A large number of changes to the national curriculum, beginning with the 1997 adoption of Outcomes Based Education, many subsequent adjustments, and the final decision -announced in 2010 - to scrap it, have further stressed an already failing system.

The way forward

Equal Education's Dwane said the debate needed to move past "blaming teachers" and towards how to achieve a "serious commitment to a national education programme that would spell out what needs to be done over the next 20-30 years".

Such a plan would have to include an assessment of existing teacher knowledge, followed by a national teacher training programme, but Dwane stressed the need to consider factors beyond teacher knowledge, including teacher motivation, and a lack of community and parental involvement.

Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.

"For the parents to know how their child is performing, and by proxy to know how the teachers are performing, is very helpful," said Ronelle Burger, one of the study's lead researchers. "Very few top-down measures can be as effective as getting the people who are affected to act to correct the problems."

The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.

“The labour market is at the heart of inequality, and central to labour market inequality is the quality of education,” they concluded.

“Policies that address inequality by intervening in the labour market will have limited success as long as the considerable pre-labour market inequalities in the form of differential school quality persist.”

Analysis: Deadly policing in South Africa

From IRIN, a story about the deadly force used by the South African Police Service.

On 13 April millions of South Africans saw news footage showing a group of police beating an unarmed protester with batons in Meqheleng, a township outside Ficksburg in South Africa’s Free State Province.

Andries Tatane, a community activist and father of two children, was then seen looking down at an apparent rubber bullet wound on his bare chest before collapsing to the ground. He died shortly afterwards.

The incident has sparked widespread public outrage and a national debate about the level of force being used by the South African Police Service (SAPS), particularly in the wake of another fatal shooting of an unarmed woman by an officer outside a Johannesburg police station on 26 April.

A spokesperson for National Police Commissioner General Bheki Cele told a local radio station that the cases should be treated as "isolated incidents", but many commentators point out that the use of lethal force by the police has risen dramatically in recent years.

Figures from the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), which is charged with investigating all deaths resulting from police action, show that 568 people were shot dead by the police in 2008/09, more than double the number just three years earlier, and the highest number since the ICD was established in 1997.

"The only thing that was an aberration [in Tatane's killing] was that it was captured on national television," said Gareth Newham, head of the Crime and Justice Programme at the Institute for Security Studies, a South Africa-based think-tank.

Lack of training

In the apartheid era police routinely used violence to quell protests, but with the transition to democracy in 1994, and the incorporation of various human rights in the constitution, police heavy handedness was discouraged.

Most demonstrations post-1994 were peaceful and many units specializing in public order policing were closed down, with a resultant loss of skills in dealing with protests, Newham said.

In recent years, mounting frustration among the high numbers of black South Africans who continue to live in relative poverty has often erupted in the form of service delivery protests like the one in Meqheleng.

Newham noted that police handling of such protests tended to escalate conflict rather than neutralize it. "They think their job is to squash protest, and anyone taking part is seen as the enemy," he told IRIN. "Often they fire tear gas and rubber bullets before there’s any real reason to."

Sam Motseare, chairperson of Meqheleng Concerned Citizens group, of which Tatane was also a member, was among those who witnessed how quickly relations between protesters and police can disintegrate. "On that fateful day there was lots of police - we were shocked there were so many," he said.

The protesters, whose main complaint was that parts of the township had been without running water for several years, had obtained permission to march and proceeded to the municipal offices without incident.

"Somebody started throwing stones from the roof of the offices - that's when things starting getting out of control," said Motseare, who said the police did not seem to have appropriate training to deal with the situation.

He told IRIN that he heard the police officer in charge give the order to shoot Tatane. "It has broken our trust in the police," he said. "We’re afraid to call for another march."

Damaging rhetoric

Newham and others argue that the escalation in the use of force by the SAPS goes beyond the issue of training. Statements by political and SAPS leaders in recent years urging police to make use of their weapons to deal with criminals have been heard by the ranks.

"The subliminal message that has been conveyed to members of the police service... seemed to encourage a gloves-off approach," said David Bruce, a senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

"A lot of police management... believe that excessive force is necessary in order to get the job done, which often means turning a blind eye to how force is used." South Africa's high rates of violent crime also mean that many people welcome a tougher stance by the police.

Norman Mampane, spokesman of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU), criticized a decision in April 2010 to introduce military-style ranks to the SAPS, describing it as "the re-militarization of the police service".

"Communities have a right to march and demonstrate," he told IRIN. "The police shouldn't be used to crush the views of protesters and strikers."

ICD not part of the solution

Within two weeks of Tatane's death eight police officers were arrested on charges of murder and assault, but Newham said it was more common for the police to evade responsibility.

The alleged shooting and subsequent death of South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) member Petros Msiza by police during clashes with striking bus workers in Pretoria in March was not captured by cameras and so far no one has been arrested. SAMWU spokesperson Tahir Sema said it was far from the first time union members had experienced violent treatment by police.

"We’ve put together evidence over a number of years," he told IRIN. "We’ve been calling for some time now for a judicial inquiry, but until we get those in government accepting that levels of police brutality are unacceptable, we won’t be able to ensure that police don’t clamp down on protesters."

Newham supports SAMWU's call for an independent judicial inquiry to investigate the patterns and causes of police using excessive force and make policy recommendations, but doubts it will happen.

"It’s often seen as politically dangerous to expose findings about the police service to the public, especially in the run-up to elections," he said, referring to municipal elections set for 18 May.

Politicians tend to believe it is the ICD's responsibility to deal with police brutality, but the institution lacks either the capacity or the legal clout to do much more than investigate allegations of misconduct, Newham said. Recommendations for disciplinary action were usually ignored.

Bruce agreed that the ICD had little power to solve the problem. "Their [the ICD] rate of convictions is almost irrelevant," he told IRIN. "The use of force by police needs to be controlled, and that needs to come from enlightened police leaders."

Small development projects funded by middle income countries

The middle income countries of India, South Africa and Brazil have a joint international development fund to help fund projects for even poorer nations. The annual budget for this fund is only three million dollars. Due to the small budget, the IBSA Fund really tries to make the most of it's development dollar. Total budgets for most projects stay right around a half a million dollars. With US Aid and the Gates Foundation doing a lot of talk about funding projects the bring the most value form their money, there might be some lessons found within the IBSA Fund.

From the IPS, writer Marina Penderis gives us a few examples of projects funded by the IBSA.

The neighbourhood of Carrefour Feuilles in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, has a history of violent gang conflict. In 2006 clashing members of that community were brought together through a waste collection and recycling scheme.

The budget for the initial 14-month project – one of the first supported by the IBSA Fund – was only 550,000 dollars, but IBSA is proud of the return on its investment.

The venture generates employment, reduces incidence of disease, prevents flood risk from garbage-clogged canals and, by recycling paper products into cooking bricks, even has a green effect. IBSA says it also has reduced violence in Carrefour Feuilles – and states that as being the main purpose of the project.

"The project provides a structure for people, who are traditionally from rival groups, to work together," explains Fernando Sena from the Brazilian Embassy in South Africa in an interview with IPS. "It employs 385 neighbourhood residents, including 207 women. Now 150,000 people benefit from improved sanitation."

The Carrefour Feuilles solid waste initiative was renewed after its initial run.

"The earthquake (that hit Haiti in 2010) didn't stop the project," says Sena. "And a study has been done to replicate it in East Timor."

Simultaneous to the first phase of the Haiti project, the IBSA Fund also started working with tiny West African state Guinea-Bissau's ministry of agriculture to train over 4,500 farmers (half of them women) in improved techniques of rice cultivation and citrus fruit and mango production, including in the monsoon-like rainy season. The budget for the first phase of this initiative was 498,750 dollars.

"This project is already in phase two and expanding to more villages," says Sena. "The idea is that the project will also provide solar energy equipment to five villages."

Video: South Africa's 'ticking time bomb'

From Al Jazeera, a video about rising unemploymemt in South Africa.

Video: Dozens dead in South Africa floods

From Al Jazeera, a video on new flooding in South Africa.

Poverty remains at Nelson Mandela's boyhood village

Nelson Mandela did a lot to end apartheid in South Africa. One thing that he and subsequent leaders have not been able to end is poverty. The village that Nelson Mandela was born and raised in has not changed much from the time he was born. The Mandela family is building a hotel near the village to spur tourism dollars but in the meantime, other needs like water and health go unfulfilled for the villagers.

In an fascinating series from the Global Post, writer Erin Conway-Smith examines the still poor life of Mandela's home village.

In the village where Nelson Mandela was born, women still walk two hours each way to fetch water.

Mvezo’s sole water tap hasn’t worked for months — a common problem — and so each day the village’s girls and women trek downhill to the Mbashe River to fill their water jugs and then climb back home. The lucky ones have a donkey to carry the weight.

This part of South Africa, the rolling hills and round huts of the Eastern Cape province, was the birthplace to many of the country’s top anti-apartheid leaders, including Walter Sisulu, Chris Hani, Steve Biko and Oliver Tambo, in whose honor the Johannesburg international airport was renamed. Two of South Africa’s three democratically elected presidents — Mandela and Thabo Mbeki — were born here.

Despite its famous sons, serious poverty persists in the villages of the Eastern Cape, one of the South Africa’s poorest provinces. Tin shacks huddled in the townships around big cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town may be the most outwardly visible evidence of the continuing poverty and vast inequalities in South Africa, but it is the countryside where hardship is most severe. More than 40 percent of South Africa’s population lives in rural areas, where the poverty rate can be as high as 85 percent, according to South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council.

Many poor rural communities lack basic services such as water and electricity, as well as decent housing and access to health care. In South Africa as a whole, life expectancy decreased by nine years between 1990 and 2010, and now stands at 52 years, according to the U.N.’s newly released Human Development Index. In terms of its overall ranking on the index, South Africa lags behind several other African countries, as well as emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia and China, although it is ahead of India.

Although Nelson Mandela was successful in ending apartheid, South Africa’s continues to grapple with persistent rural poverty and with severe enduring inequities. More than 16 years after the end of apartheid, Mandela’s African National Congress party has failed to significantly lessen the poverty in rural areas.

When Mandela returned to the Eastern Cape in 1990 after 27 years in prison, he was shocked by how little had changed since his youth. He visited the village of Qunu, where he had lived as a boy, and found the villagers more politically aware — but just as poor, if not more so.

In the years that followed, there was little improvement. Even as president, Mandela hadn’t wanted to fuel tribalism by being seen to favor the Eastern Cape, and so he gave the struggling area no special attention.

The Eastern Cape province is a land of undulating, bare hills that runs from the Indian Ocean to the inland mountains and deserts. Mvezo, a village at the end of a bumpy dirt road off the highway, is poorer than other communities that are more easily accessible, such as Qunu, which is on the main N2 highway and has seen some development in recent years.

PEPFAR may soon begin distributing microbicide gels

Earlier this year, a clinical trial found great promise for the use of microbicide gels to prevent the spread of AIDS. In an interview with Reuters Alert Net, the head of the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program says they would like to start distributing the gels once regulatory hurdles are cleared.

Writer Andrew Quinn interviews PEPFAR head Eric Goosby talks about the future methods of the program.

"We would support PReP in terms of high risk populations," Goosby, the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, told Reuters, adding that various country approval plans were already under internal consideration.

Goosby said microbicide gels -- a focus of hope since a South African clinical trial this year showed at least one version lowered HIV infection rates -- could also play a part once full regulatory approval is obtained and more is understood about how they work.

"We haven't worked out the delivery system or the dosing or interval of application," Goosby said. "We are absolutely positioned to engage in it as soon as we know those."

Goosby spoke as PEPFAR signed a new five-year deal with South Africa to bolster its AIDS fight, signaling a deepening cooperation between Washington and a country once depicted as representing the wrong approach to the AIDS epidemic.
...

The addition of PrEP and microbicide gels could represent a potentially large new budget item for PEPFAR, the $18.8 billion program launched by former President George W. Bush, but Goosby said new efficiencies in both care and treatment were already streamlining the overall bill.

He said South Africa had proposed using PrEP to treat uninfected inmates in South Africa's prisons -- a major vector for HIV -- while pilot projects elsewhere were looking at sex workers and men who have sex with men.

1.5 million Zimbabwean migrants soon to return

1.5 million Zimbabweans are living South Africa but many are expected to return soon. South Africa is expected to resume deportations of Zimbabwean migrants at the end of the month. South Africa did allow Zimbabwean people in during the country's recent political and economic collapse.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Katy Migiro describes how the country is bracing for the mass return of people.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says thousands of migrants are expected to pass through a reception and support centre it's been running since 2006 for Zimbabwean migrants at Beitbridge on the Zimbabwe-South Africa border.

IOM officials say services on offer include medical care, counselling for rape victims, temporary shelter and family tracing for unaccompanied children, and free transport home to Zimbabwe. IOM also has a project to help people to set up their own small businesses, such as hairdressing or carpentry.

Poverty is likely to be the greatest challenge for returnees with unemployment a staggering 80 percent in Zimbabwe. Many will not even have money to travel from the border back to their communities or buy basic household items, aid workers say.

UNHCR will help returnees get vital documentation. National identity cards are necessary “for pretty much everything” in Zimbabwe, including sitting school exams and accessing health care services, according to Tina Ghelli, a UNHCR Southern Africa official.

In April 2009, South Africa halted the repatriation of Zimbabweans in recognition of the political violence and economic collapse in their home country.

South Africa now wants to resume deportations following the introduction of a power-sharing government between President Robert Mugabe and rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai after disputed elections in 2008.

South Africa plans ahead on how to fight AIDS

A new study has set forth several different plans for South Africa on combating the spread of AIDS. The report gave a couple of options ranging from spending 88 billion dollars to 102 billion dollars. South Africa has more people living with HIV-AIDS within its borders than any other country in the world.

From the Guardian, health writer Sarah Boseley details who compiled the report and its contents.

A major inquiry has now been carried out by the aids2031 South Africa project at the request of the South African government. This is an investigation by the Cape Town-based Centre for Economic Governance and Aids in Africa with the Results for Development Institute from Washington DC. South African government officials sat on the steering committee. Their report paints three different scenarios for South Africa. It's not the good, the bad and the ugly. Nothing is so simple. The options on offer here are dubbed narrow, expanded and hard choices and it takes the long view, examining what shoould happen over the next 20 years.

Essentially, the narrow option is where South Africa's current Aids plan will take it. Between now and 2031, that will cost R658bn, which is US$88bn. The number of new infections will fall, but only gradually, to about 350,000 a year.

The expanded option is ambitious and has greater focus on prevention. Male circumcision programmes would be introduced, but also behavioural change initiatives, to reduce violence against women and empower commercial sex workers. There would also be some initiatives to reduce poverty and an increase in condom distribution and voluntary HIV counselling and testing. The total cost over the 20 years could reach R765bn, or US$102bn, but new infections would fall to less than 200,000 a year.

The hard choices programme envisages the government taking the difficult decision to focus on what works best, at a time of financial austerity. Male circumcision would be rapidly scaled up, but some other interventions, for instance to help orphans and vulnerable children, would be curtailed. It's the cheapest option, at R598bn, or US$79bn, but new infections would still fall to 225,000 a year, the group says.

The expanded scenario is clearly the best. This is what the report says:

"If considerably greater political will and financial resources can be mobilised and the South African society can be motivated to adopt important social and behavioural changes... a powerful change in the epidemic could occur, with lower rates on infection and mortality.

"If the financial resources for HIV/Aids are highly constrained and political backing remains strong but more moderate than under the expanded... scenario, then the more targeted approach under the hard choices is still an attractive alternative to the status quo."

A new wrinkle to the unemployment problem in South Africa

South Africa is cracking down against textile factories that are paying less than minimum wage, but authorities are getting some unexpected resistance from the workers who make the low wages.

Poor timing of a raise of the minimum wage during the global recession has only complicated an unemployment problem in South Africa. A problem that was already compounded by years of apartheid. After apartheid ended, South Africa saw little growth in unskilled jobs. Now those jobs are instead decreasing because the jobs are going to other countries that have cheaper labor.

From the New York Times, writer Celia Dugger describes the scene at on textile mill closing.

The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it.

“Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric.

She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.

The women’s spontaneous protest is just one sign of how acute South Africa’s long-running unemployment crisis has become. With their own industry in ruinous decline, the victim of low-wage competition from China, and too few unskilled jobs being created in South Africa, the women feared being out of work more than getting stuck in poorly paid jobs.

In the 16 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has followed the prescriptions of the West, opening its market-based economy to trade, while keeping inflation and public debt in check. It has won praise for its efforts, and the economy has grown, but not nearly fast enough to end an intractable unemployment crisis.

For over a decade, the jobless rate has been among the highest in the world, fueling crime, inequality and social unrest in the continent’s richest nation. The global economic downturn has made the problem much worse, wiping out more than a million jobs. Over a third of South Africa’s workforce is now idle. And 16 years after Nelson Mandela led the country to black majority rule, more than half of blacks ages 15 to 34 are without work — triple the level for whites.

“The numbers are mind-boggling,” said James Levinsohn, a Yale University economist.

Moving away from public schools in South Africa

The post-apartheid generation of South Africa has seen a massive failure of the nation's schools. Leaving those from black or rural neighborhoods uneducated and unable to take advantage of their new freedoms.

The poor schools are leading some parents to take it upon themselves to put their children in private schools. Many of the new private or sponsored schools come with unique ideas in education similar to some of the US charter schools.

From the New York Times, writer Celia Dugger gives us some examples of new methods of education South Africa.

As many of South Africa’s public schools have failed a post-apartheid generation of children from poor townships and rural areas, a budding movement of educators, philanthropists and desperate parents is increasingly searching for alternatives.

For a decade, banks and foundations here have sponsored promising township students to attend elite, mostly white schools. But now new private schools are springing up to serve poor and working-class black children, giving the still dominant public system some newfound competition and perhaps even devising models that will end up influencing it.

The 500 students at three schools known as Leap represent one approach. All of the students, including Gcobani, come from black townships. They are immersed in an educational environment that is reminiscent of some of the most successful American charter schools.

In another undertaking, civic leaders are trying to revive the rural mission schools that educated many of South Africa’s liberation heroes but were largely destroyed by apartheid-era laws that required the institutions to submit to a racist system’s dictates or surrender control to the state. Nelson Mandela’s alma mater, Healdtown, and the Inanda Seminary, South Africa’s first high school for African girls, founded by American missionaries in 1869, are among those to be restored.

And in a small platinum-rich dominion near Johannesburg, the king of the Bafokeng people, Leruo Tshekedi Molotlegi, has built a $72 million private school for 800 children, most of whom will be local boys and girls on scholarship.

But a growing number of families, even without philanthropic support and tired of what they see as unmotivated public school teachers, are scraping together money on their own to send their children to bare-bones private schools tucked away in abandoned factories, shopping centers, shacks and high-rises, a new study of rural and urban communities in three provinces found.

In fact, researchers discovered far more of these low-fee private schools than official statistics suggest and surprisingly noted that public school teachers dissatisfied with their own workplaces were among the parents of students in these schools. While national studies are needed to gauge the full scope of the phenomenon, the researchers said, the evidence suggests that such schools are increasingly popular.

“Some ask, ‘Why aren’t parents screaming about the appalling state of public education?’ ” said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Johannesburg-based Center for Development and Enterprise, which conducted the study. “They’re moving with their feet.”

Video: White South Africans in poverty

From Reuters, this video shows the growing numbers of white South Africans who live in poverty.

South Africa hopes to grow manufacturing sector

Mining of metals and oil comprise much of the exports from Africa. South Africa is a rare exception, as most of its exports come from manufacturing businesses. South Africa government and business leaders hope to become a worldwide manufacturing leader to not only improve their own country, but to spur economic growth through the continent.

From the New York Times, writer Matthew Saltrmarsh tells us about the positives and negatives of South Africa's economy.

A group of companies is working in sectors like clean energy, aviation, engineering, military contracting and mining, hoping to benefit from positive growth forecasts for the region.

The state hopes this will lead to job creation and other benefits, and has played its part in some cases by offering direct financing and other sweeteners. It has also backed new university research positions and is trying to promote centers of excellence.

“We are a producer and exporter,” said Naledi Pandor, the minister of science and technology. “Now we’re saying: let’s become an innovator.”

South Africa’s many hurdles — notably unemployment, crime, illegal immigration, corruption, income inequality and health problems — have not disappeared. But executives and officials believe that the environment is improving and that the country’s success as host of the recent soccer World Cup can act as a catalyst.
...

The democratic government that came to power in 1994 inherited an economy racked by internal conflict and external sanctions. Yet from 2004 to 2007, gross domestic product grew on average over 5 percent annually. It contracted by 1.8 percent in 2009, affected by energy shortages, slower consumption and the global recession, but it is expected to grow at 3.3 percent in 2010 and 5 percent next year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mining accounts for almost a tenth of output, but in contrast to much of the rest of the continent, South Africa also has well-developed manufacturing, whose output accounts for over 50 percent of exports.

“South Africa’s ambition to climb the value-added chain is valid, justified and doable,” said Andreas Wörgötter, an economist at the O.E.C.D. who wrote a recent study of the country. The main challenges, he said, will be to “broaden economic activity” by creating jobs, moderating wages and improving the regulatory environment.

Unemployment remains a huge hurdle; the O.E.C.D. forecasts it at 24.5 percent this year. Industrial strikes remain a feature, the health and education systems are also troubled and social inequity runs deep. A recent study from the University of Cape Town described the country as “the most consistently unequal economy in the world.”

Fear drives migrants away from South Africa

From IRIN, a story on an escalation of attacks on foreigners living in South Africa since the conclusion of the World Cup.

John Muswere, 34, arrived four hours ago at the main bus terminus in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, after making an unplanned journey with his wife, their three-year-old child and few household possessions from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he spent 18 months working as a mechanic.

"I am left with little money on me because I left South Africa in a hurry and before my employer could pay me. All the transport operators are saying my money is too little and I don't know how I am going to leave this place [the bus terminus]," Muswere told IRIN while his wife tried to pacify their wailing child.

The hasty trip was prompted by rumours that foreigners would be targeted once the FIFA World Cup finished, just as they were in May 2008, when 62 people were killed and more than 100,000 displaced.

Since the final game on 11 July there have been numerous attacks on foreign nationals and their businesses, mainly in Western Cape Province. The Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, estimates that 1.2 million Zimbabweans live in South Africa, mostly arriving in the past decade after their country's economy collapsed.

"I will be starting from scratch, and at no time has life been so uncertain for me. I don't know how I am going to feed the family because it might be a long time before I get a job here," Muswere said. His uncle has offered them temporary accommodation.

The threats began a few months before the soccer world cup, and came in the form of notes pasted on the door of their one-room rented flat in the inner-city suburb of Berea, Johannesburg, "telling me that they would kill me and my family if I remained in their country after the World Cup".

The notes accused Muswere and other Zimbabweans in the suburb of "stealing their sisters, jobs and houses".

"I thought they were mere threats until they accosted my neighbour, who was coming from night duty at a local supermarket where he worked as a security guard, poured petrol on him and set him alight. Fortunately, he survived but he is still in hospital," said Muswere.

Grace Takawira, 46, arrived on the same bus as Muswere after travelling from Western Cape, where she had been employed as a domestic worker for the past four years. "I just packed my few belongings and hitch-hiked to Johannesburg, where I boarded a bus to Harare," Takawira told IRIN.

"I had seen several Zimbabweans and other foreigners being attacked shortly after the World Cup ended. Many foreigners who feared for their lives sought shelter at police stations, but I could not stand the idea of living as a refugee." She has decided to try cross-border trading to feed her three children.

"Hundreds of Zimbabweans are crossing back to Zimbabwe on a daily basis as they flee xenophobic attacks," said the bus driver, who plies the Harare-Johannesburg route but declined to be identified.

Burdening a weak economy

"Most of them are in a desperate situation, as they don't have enough money for bus fares. Some of them only managed enough money to come as far as Beitbridge [on the Zimbabwe side of the border] and are squatting in that town," he told IRIN.

"The South African government should improve on its policies, so that more jobs are created and there is greater literacy among citizens of that country," John Makumbe, a Harare based political analyst, told IRIN.

"It is clear that high levels of unemployment, widespread poverty, and low levels of skills are contributing to xenophobia among South Africans, who see foreigners as the main cause of their problems."

Innocent Makwiramiti, an economist and former chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, expected problems. "The economy is still weak and the return of Zimbabweans from South Africa will push up unemployment. While those that are returning might have skills in their respective professions, it will be difficult for them to start their own ventures because they don't have the capital."

The opportunities that come with the World Cup

The World Cup brings with it a chance to get a temporary lift in the economic fortunes of many in South Africa. About a dozen women took the opportunity to sell meals to the construction workers building the new soccer stadiums. These enterprising women hope that the money earned from cooking will keep their children in school and help to grow their businesses.

From the Washington Examiner, Associated Press writer Donna Bryson tells us the story of one of these women.

Cecilia Dube's dream has taken her from dust-choked building sites to university classrooms, from the rubble of demolished food stands to cooking meals in a park in an upscale neighborhood where fans watch World Cup soccer on a giant screen.

The World Cup. Biggest sporting event on Earth. The host nation's month in the world spotlight. Tourists in their droves. A jolt of adrenaline for a sluggish economy. Or so goes the promise of mega-events such as these. For Dube, some of the rewards have already arrived, but for her and millions of her fellow citizens, the route out of poverty has so far proved fickle and arduous.

Her dream is a humble one — to one day run her own restaurant. But for now, she must suffice with the title of "trained food handler," tending a food stand at the park consisting of a table, two chairs and a gas cooker. It's a long way from owning a restaurant, but at least she's no longer up before dawn frying doughnuts by candlelight.
...

Life for her and many like her is a constant struggle. Two decades after South Africa broke free of apartheid, being judged fit to host the World Cup is a huge achievement. But what it most desperately needs is more jobs, houses, clinics and self-starting, taxpaying entrepreneurs.

Dube would love to be one. After her husband's death left her without income, she worked at a fast food restaurant and traded in cheap clothes. She took extra work selling sandwiches in a tavern with no kitchen. When the tavern owner took over her business, she decided to strike out on her own.

South Africa had been picked for the World Cup and needed to build facilities. In 2006 Dube opened shop — in a shack, then a trailer — where the soccer authority's new offices were going up. The following year she moved to the nearby site of Soccer City, the main World Cup stadium. It was being renovated and there were hungry workers to feed.
...

For three years she was one of a dozen cooks providing meals at Soccer City. They called themselves the Soccer City Traders. A typical day would begin before dawn with Dube barefoot and hard at work by the light of a candle stuck in an empty soda bottle, making triple-decker bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and frying vetkoeke, South African doughnuts.

Then, one morning last October, came a catastrophe. Police arrived and told the Soccer City Traders they were in the way of construction. The police broke up the stalls, loading the scraps of wood, cardboard and broken plastic chairs onto trucks.

The men and women immediately held a protest march and headed to Johannesburg City Hall. They were told they could open shop in another area near the stadium. The next morning, Dube was serving breakfast as usual. Catastrophe averted.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/out-of-poverty-for-south-african-woman-one-of-many-world-cup-holds-out-an-elusive-dream-96779349.html#ixzz0rUMuaNeh

South African police being trained in child exploitation tracking software

A big concern for the upcoming World Cup is a possible increase of child exploitation during the tournament. With many tourists coming to South Africa the fear is that many children or young women will also be brought in to be "rented" during the games.

A Microsoft program manger has helped to develop a software to combat human trafficking. John Hancock developed the Child Exploitation Tracking System with police in Toronto. The program is now spreading to other police departments and officers from South Africa were recently introduced to the software.

From the Globe and Mail, writer Ann Hui talked to Hancock as he visited the training.

“Calling it child pornography just sends the wrong message,” he said of the images shown to him and a group of Microsoft executives in 2003 by former Toronto child-exploitation officer Paul Gillespie. “These were crime scene images. These were children being abused.”

Mr. Hancock, a 37-year-old program manager at Microsoft, was born in the United Kingdom, but grew up near Johannesburg where he lived until his mid-20s. This is why, when helping the Toronto Police in 2003 create the Child Exploitation Tracking System – a software tool that is now used globally to combat child pornography and trafficking – he hoped his home country might one day get the chance to use it.

“There’s a lot of poverty, a lot of children missing parents, and a lot of tourists,” Mr. Hancock said. “It’s the perfect storm for child exploitation and trafficking.”

Seven years later, and amidst concerns of increased abuse during the upcoming World Cup, Mr. Hancock is finally seeing that happen.

On Monday, he watched as a group of South African police officers and criminal prosecutors learned how to use CETS at the Toronto Police College in Etobicoke.

“It’s been the highlight of my career,” Mr. Hancock said.

Although the software won’t be implemented in time for the World Cup, he said he hopes that the other investigation techniques taught will help to immediately combat abuse. Mr. Hancock now lives in Redmond, Wash., but was in Toronto on business and dropped by to watch the training.

The group from South Africa is being trained in areas such as victims’ issues and the proper uses of online sources by the Kids’ Internet Safety Alliance, a non-profit organization started by Mr. Gillespie before leaving the Toronto Police in 2006. Mr. Gillespie estimates there are about one million images online that depict the abuse of about 50,000 children.

Though Mr. Gillespie is careful to say that the South African group is not being trained only because of the World Cup, he acknowledged that large global events like it pose a risk. Last week, UNICEF addressed concerns of exploitation during the World Cup by launching a social networking platform called Red Card contact, aimed at combating abuse.

“For the same reason the Olympics were a challenge – many people in the world coming to one spot, they want to be entertained, they often have a lot of money,” said Mr. Gillespie. “And along with that comes people who are interested in the purchasing or renting of human beings.”

Taking in orphaned relatives too much for one couple

After parents die of AIDS someone has to take care of the newly orphaned children. For many in Africa, they are unable to earn enough to feed their own children let alone any relatives they take on. For one couple in South Africa the extra burden broke their marriage apart.

From the Christian Science Monitor, writer Scott Baldauf gives us one family's heartbreaking story.

There are days when Olga Thimbela thinks it was a mistake to take in the orphaned children of her sister and her aunt. Life before the arrival of these six children – whose mothers both died of AIDS – was not easy. But after their arrival, Olga says, her life became impossible.

Today, her marriage is on the rocks, her health is suffering, her own biological children get only a fraction of her time, and her relatives all think she is rich because of the $90-per-month foster-care grants she receives for each of her schoolgoing foster children.

The strain of looking after nine children – three of her own, six of her extended family – and fending off greedy relatives has finally brought Olga to the breaking point.

“Sometimes I feel like I made a mistake to take these children,” says Olga, standing in her neat shack, her 6-month-old infant girl, Hlumelo, tied to her back with a blanket. Olga is in tears. “I think, maybe if I didn’t take these children, I could take care of my own kids. Everything is destroyed in my life. My family. My marriage. Everything.”

If Olga were the only South African woman looking after other people’s children, her story would be a mere individual tragedy. But Olga Thimbela is just one of hundreds of thousands of South Africans who are looking after the estimated 1.4 million children who have lost one or both parents because of AIDS. The majority of AIDS orphans are looked after by members of their own extended families, an extraordinary cultural generosity that many South Africans say is rooted in the philosophy of ubuntu, where individual happiness takes a back seat to collective well-being. But in a country where 43 percent of the population live below the poverty line, ubuntu means that families who are already desperately poor and barely able to feed themselves must stretch their resources even further to take in others.

When we first met Olga Thimbela and her husband, Pontsho Monamodi, in early 2007, they were a happy couple making the best they could of a difficult situation. Olga was still taking jobs as a housekeeper. Pontsho, a former South African Army reserve soldier, found unsteady employment as a security guard. Older children like 24-year-old Elizabeth and 18-year-old Thabang helped to look after younger children, and 13-year-old Bulelwa would help the children with their schoolwork.

But then, Olga says, the government grants that were intended to help Olga and Pontsho pay for the upkeep of her relatives’ children, became a source of friction in Olga’s family. In the times when Pontsho and Olga were both working, extended family members would demand their share – based on the notion that those doing well should look after those who are poorer. And when Olga or Pontsho would be temporarily out of work, Olga says, her relatives would come by and criticize them for “eating the children’s money.”

Spending Spring Break at a South African orphanage

A high school student who once spent time in an orphanage wanted to help children going through a similar experience. Then a visitor came to her school to talk about an orphanage in South Africa called Open Arms. Once Jen Deglmann heard about the orphanage she organized a trip with a few other students and teachers to spend spring break in South Africa.

Deglmann is familiar with what the children in South Africa are going through as she spent the first couple of years of her life in an orphanage in the Ukraine. Diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome she was adopted by a couple in Minnesota where she flourished into a healthy teen.

From the Star Tribune, writer Allie Shah talks to Deglmann about the visit.

The students' days at the orphanage were spent playing board games with the children, baking cookies for them, watching movies with them and giving them piggyback rides.

"It didn't seem like work when you were doing it," said Deglmann. "You're put in the middle of these kids who want love and attention, and you just go for it."

In all, there were more than 30 kids at the orphanage -- boys and girls 12 and under.

The children live in brightly colored huts with ceilings made of straw and cow manure. But the huts were tidy quarters, Deglmann said.

Their time spent with the boys and girls left a deep impression on all four student volunteers, said Nicole Rasmussen, the freshman dean at Benilde-St. Margaret's who chaperoned the girls along with another teacher.

They learned from the orphanage director stories of where each child came from, where their parents were, and how they came to be orphans.

One toddler girl had been stabbed in the forehead by her father. Another small boy had been found in the garbage.

Such heart-wrenching biographies opened the high school students' eyes to larger societal tragedies and how they affect people's lives.

"They have a deeper understanding of poverty and what child abuse and child neglect and disease and lack of infrastructure can do," Rasmussen said. "I do believe they are changed."

Attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa

From IRIN, a human rights organization sheds light on the treatment of foreigners in South Africa.

Foreign nationals are being attacked with "impunity" in South Africa, a leading human rights organization charged as the latest service delivery protests turned violent and several hundred residents turned their anger on Ethiopian refugees living in Siyathemba township, about 80km east of Johannesburg.

Service delivery protests erupted on 7 February in Siyathemba, a satellite township of Balfour, a rural town in Mpumalanga Province. Shops owned by foreign nationals were looted, more than 100 people, including women and children fled the township, and police arrested 22 people for public violence, according to reports.

Similar acts of xenophobia took place during service delivery protests eight months ago in the same township, when the perpetrators were also arrested but charges of public violence were subsequently dropped.

"Many of those affected by the violence ... were also victims of violence in July 2009, where the shops of foreign nationals were targeted following service delivery protests and around 100 people were displaced. Those who laid criminal charges relating to the violence and the damages were later intimidated into dropping these," the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in Southern Africa (CORMSA), said in a statement.

Amnesty International, a global rights watchdog, said in a statement: "There remains a culture of impunity for crimes against refugees and migrants [in South Africa]. There persists also low public awareness of the country's human rights obligations towards refugees and others in need of international protection."

Service delivery protests have become frequent in the post-apartheid era, and although most are peaceful demonstrations demanding that government fulfil their commitments to improve the lives of the majority, some spill over into violence and more often than not result in xenophobic violence.

Duncan Breen, CORMSA's advocacy officer, told IRIN that "issues of governance" often fuelled community frustrations, which could lead to outbreaks of xenophobic violence.

He said civil society and the police were developing early warning systems to provide an intelligence network of possible xenophobic outbreaks and/or violence, and government was establishing a national action plan to protect vulnerable people against xenophobia, which would fall under the aegis of the justice department.

Broken promises

In August 2009, President Jacob Zuma and a host of ministers descended unannounced on Balfour and Siyathemba in the aftermath of the violent service delivery protests and deplored the xenophobic violence, which was seen as a commitment by Zuma and his new government to provide service delivery in disadvantaged communities.

"Places like Balfour, which seem to be very remote - that's the places I'm going to be going to, unannounced, all the time, to get to know what are the problems, why didn't we deliver certain things," Zuma said during his visit.

"The ministers, together with the provincial and local leadership, agreed on short-, medium- and long-term interventions, which should begin to address challenges and concerns of communities," said a statement issued by his office after the visit.

The presidency undertook to alleviate poverty, support community projects, generate employment, build 100 homes "within the current financial year [which ends on 28 Feb 2010]" and improve transport infrastructure, among other things.

Tebogo Moagi, a member of the community steering committee and an organizer of the service delivery protest, told local media that the presidency's promises were empty.

The committee has demanded that Zuma return to the township to explain the government's inaction. "Since the protest [in July 2009] nothing has happened. We have had no response from the municipality," Moagi said.

Zuma is unlikely to accede to their demands; he is currently in Cape Town preparing for the opening of parliament on 11 February - which will also mark the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release from jail - and has maintained a low profile since it emerged 10 days ago that he had fathered a daughter out of wedlock, now four months old.

In the first six weeks of 2010 foreigners were also attacked in Atteridgeville near Pretoria, Riviersonderend in the Western Cape, and Polokwane in Limpopo Province. Xenophobic violence erupted throughout South Africa in 2008, killing at least 62 people and displacing 100,000 others.