3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions

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    Enterprise development on the margins : Making markets work for the poor?
    (2008-09-23T13:26:03Z) Philip, Teresa Kate
    This thesis is about the quest to build effective strategies to support the development of enterprise on the margins of the economy, to create jobs and reduce poverty. A core part of this challenge includes grappling with the role of markets in development, and of markets as a critical part of the context in which enterprise development in rural and peri-urban areas can either provide a path out of poverty – or instead serve to lock people into poverty. The thesis explores these issues by tracking the experience of the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA) as it attempted to grapple with this challenge. MDA is the development wing of South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) , and was set up to create jobs and support enterprise development for communities affected by the loss of jobs on the mines. The thesis covers a fourteen-year period in MDA’s history, from its inception in 1988 until 2002. It tracks the learning process across several phases in the development of MDA’s approach. These included the development of worker co-operatives, the establishment of business service centres, value-chain work in the craft sector, and the commercialization of a juice product from the indigenous marula berry. In the process, MDA engaged with an emergent paradigm in the development sector called ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’. Can markets really be made to work for the poor? Or even just made to work ‘better’ for the poor? Or is the process of inclusion in markets inexorably and inevitably one of making the poor work for markets? The thesis explores these issues in the context of MDA’s experience, locating this within a wider set of theoretical concerns over the role of markets in society, and the ways in which societies have protected themselves from the negative impacts of the development of market economies. It draws on wider political economy approaches to argue that markets are institutions that are socially constructed, and explores what scope there might therefore be to construct them differently. While recognising the importance of social protection, the thesis argues that there is a need to go beyond defensive strategies aimed at protecting society from markets, to identify new terms of engagement within markets to shape markets, and to harness their wealth-creating potential in ways that have different distributional consequences, as part of a long-term agenda of eradicating poverty.
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    Education transformation in South Africa: the impact of finance equity reforms in public schooling after 1998
    (2008-08-25T09:07:14Z) Motala, Shireen
    ABSTRACT Using the lens of school finance reform, this thesis analyses the progress towards equity in public schooling in post-apartheid South Africa. It distinguishes between equality and equity and argues that that redress, positive discrimination or differential distribution must become part of a meaningful definition of equal education. This thesis utilises recent quantitative data and empirical methodology to explicate the patterns and typology of inequality in public schooling in one province in post-apartheid South Africa, and to deepen our understanding of the construct and application of equity within that milieu. It does this by establishing a key equity indicator, per capita expenditure, for each of the approximately 1900 schools in Gauteng in 1999 and 2002, and by carrying out various school-level analyses on this data. This approach quantifies inequity and progress towards equality, and establishes a broader set of variables and correlates with which to comprehend school finance equity. This is particularly significant because data of actual school-level expenditure as an outcome of merging various databases did not previously exist for Gauteng province, nor did an understanding of the role of private income in differentiating public schooling, particularly on the basis of fees. For the first time, the actual expenditure for each school in Gauteng is established, allowing an assessment of the variability of financing in public schooling. The disaggregated analysis illustrates that the race-based hierarchy of school finance expenditure has been replaced by a new typology of schools based on new categories of privilege and disadvantage. After eight years of post-apartheid education, an important achievement in the public schooling sector is convergence or equalisation in state expenditure. Differential distribution, a notion of equity which includes what is socially just, has been slow to develop. Moreover, while old racial patterns of distribution have shifted, private inputs into public schooling change the picture of “sameness” to one of substantial differentiation. An emerging feature is the evidence of intra-race differentiation, illustrated by the growing spread of expenditure within former African schools. There is also empirical evidence that the emerging education system in postapartheid South Africa has continued to favour the deracialising middle class, despite policy intentions which promote redress for the poor. Unequal education still continues, bur for a different set of reasons. At an empirical level, the research shows that while there has been significant progress towards same spending on average, specific type of schools have benefited more or less. There are policy and management explanations for this. Equity as differential distribution is yet to be achieved. At a methodological level, the study shows both the feasibility and utility of using disaggregated approaches and the ingredient method for fiscal research. At a conceptual level, the study shows the need to go beyond existing categories when exploring equal education, to look at the newly privileged and the newly disadvantaged. This contributes to our understanding of a more complex typology of public schooling in South Africa.
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    Revisiting the self-help housing debate: Perceptions of self-help Housing by the beneficiaries of low-cost housing in South Africa
    (2008-08-07T13:05:20Z) Yengo, Andre Mengi
    Regardless of housing backlog and rapid urbanization created by population growth, the promotion of Self-Help Housing by authorities in charge of housing and policy documents1, there is a limited used of Self-Help Housing in South Africa. In pursuing the Self-Help Housing debate, this research argues that the failure to implement a widespread use of Self-Help Housing is not directly linked to weaknesses of Self-Help Housing. Instead, the difficult access to land for urban poor households, the ignorance from households of their right of having access to adequate shelter, the attitude of dependency evident in households, the paternalistic attitude from the government, the failure to constitute an active community and the failure to establish real priorities of poor people are the main causes of the limited use of Self-Help Housing in South Africa. Tembisa, one of the South Africa’s Townships, is used in this research for the purpose of illustrating the unsuccessful implementation of Self-Help Housing, adopted in South as People Housing Process (PHP).
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