At present, many national and local governmental programmes initiated to promote greater economic growth as well as alleviating poverty and unemployment include, among others, Local Economic Development (LED) poverty alleviation projects. LED poverty alleviation projects which are the focus of this study typically concentrate on empowering vulnerable groups, especially women and the disabled to improve their livelihoods by providing them with rural infrastructure, employment opportunities as well as training. It is evident that the need to address poverty and inequality has been firmly placed at the centre of the nation’s agenda. Several poverty audits have been undertaken, and a range of policy documents and strategies have been developed to address this crucial issue. The LED strategy is a locally driven process by which public, business and the non-governmental sector partners work collectively to create better conditions for economic growth and employment generation in order to sustain livelihood and to improve future economic prospects. This study explored the concept of poverty as understood globally and investigated the perspectives and poverty alleviation approaches in developing countries and in South Africa against the background of certain developing countries’ trends, especially LED. The study also determined the meaning of the concept of LED within the South African context and investigated the historical legislative milieu of LED, the key role players and strategies as well as an investigation on how this relates to the implementation strategy of LED implementation projects in the Thulamela Municipality. This study also assessed whether LED initiatives, and in particular, LED projects are successful toward alleviating poverty in the Thulamela Municipality in the Limpopo province. Specific critical issues addressed in this study include the determination of the socio-economic development benefits derived by the projects’ participants in the Thulamela Municipality towards unemployment and poverty alleviation as well as the sustainability of the projects. / Prof. C. J. Auriacombe

The study to investigates the livelihood activities of female-headed households in Letlhakane village. In its attempt to examine how these activities are organised, maintained and diversified, it analyses the challenges in carrying out the activities and the possible solutions to these challenges at the household level. The study concerns itself with the views of female heads on the livelihood activities done in their households. The main focus is on what these women and their household members were doing for the survival of the entire household in the remote rural village of Letlhakane between December 2004 and January 2005. For this study a qualitative methodology was vital to gather information on the livelihood activities and composition of households and the contribution of the members to the survival of the household. In-depth, follow-up interviews were used as the research method. The informants of the study were female heads from female-headed households. This was supplemented with observation by the researcher on the activities and the physical surroundings of the village. Photos were also taken in the village. This study reaches a number of conclusions. First, female-headed households in Letlhakane village are a diverse group in terms of the activities they embark on and the composition of their households. But they share a common aspect: their livelihood activities are not sufficient for the survival of their households. There were few or no activities for household survival, even for those households that have been female-headed for a long period of time. As compared to single household heads, female heads with partners were better off when judged by overall returns from the activities. The activities in the households studied were keeping goats, fowls and domestic animals such as dogs and subsistence agriculture in the form of growing maize, melons, cabbages, spinach, beans and fruit gardens. They also grew trees and plants for medicinal purposes such as aloes and lemons. Boyfriends were another source of income for some of the female-headed households. Most of the activities were geared towards immediate consumption, and could not stretch as far as investment. Lower returns from the activities affected children from these households in two ways. Firstly, they had to engage in activities to help provide for the household and secondly some had to drop out of school because of insufficient means to afford schooling. Women heads had the responsibilities of caring for and nurturing the family, raising children and providing food for their household in the households studied. The absence of opportunities for survival and insecure livelihood activities pose a threat to the continued survival of these households. The main obstacles to the livelihood activities were lack of resources such as sufficient land and water, cooperation between residents, skills and financial capital. A major difficulty for women especially, is that voices are only listened to in the village if they come from an adult male figure in the household. Positive aspects for livelihoods that came out from the study were the prevalence of social capital amongst neighbours and relatives. / Carina van Rooyen

M.Com. (Business Management) / Southern Africa, when viewed in the context of a developing region, is an area of extremes. Sophisticated urban development, financial markets, agricultural development and technically-advanced production processes form a direct contrast to the squatting, subsistence agriculture, malnutrition and unemployment found in a single complex Southern Africa socio-economic environment. The most important goal of economic development in Southern Africa is the raising of the standard of living of the entire population. The interests and needs of the individual play a prominent role in this pre-determined goal. The results that are obtained in this process are largely determined by the element of planning. In the planning stage, vision and insight need to be displayed to determine the anticipated end results. The availability of current information is the basis on which any real action, in the attempt to achieve the aforementioned objective, will depend. The purpose of this study was to compile a macro-economic information framework for development planning and to illustrate this framework with an example.

M.A. / The study on evaluation of income-generating projects was conducted on ten (10) income-generating projects in Mogale City in the Gauteng Province. It was conducted during July and August 2007. The study was evaluative research, and a quantitative approach was used to conduct the study. A purposive sampling type of non-probability sampling was utilized to select respondents within the projects. Five (5) respondents were selected from each project. A questionnaire was used as a data collection method and was administered by the researcher to the respondents. A total of fifty (50) questionnaires were distributed to respondents from ten (10) various projects that did sewing, vegetable gardening and brick-making. The results of the study have indicated that the projects in Mogale City are generating an income in order to address poverty. However, it is not effectively eradicated, as some projects are not generating enough money. This means that the money that respondents receive does not meet all their needs

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The concept of community development is founded on the premise that changes in the living conditions of people are best effected by the people themselves. The term community evokes the idea of a homogeneous social group who can recognise their common interests and work together harmoniously for their common good. The concerns of the leading development agents and donors in the past two decades have been on empowering communities to participate in their own development by taking control of decisions and initiatives that seek to improve their living conditions. The zeal to address these concerns has in the past decade been pushed with such resounding statements that people’s participation in development projects has not only been seen as a basic human right, but also as an imperative condition for human survival. It has been strongly argued in the UNDP reports that the overall development strategy is to enable people to gain access to a much broader range of opportunities.From this perspective, development as a social activity seeks to ensconce economic liberalisation, freedom of association, good governance and access to free market economy as the guiding tenets of an improved life in all communities in the world. The realization of this dream posed a major challenge to many governments in the Third World and the 1980s saw the emergence of ‘associational revolution’ – the proliferation of small-scale non governmental organizations (NGOs) with relative autonomy from the state. The mainstream development agencies perceived the NGOs as the best instruments to instigate changes in the living conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged people. For this reason, NGOs became increasingly instrumental in implementing development objectives in the rural and disadvantaged communities. Development in this sense consists of processes in which various groups are stimulated to improve aspects of their lives particularly by people from outside their community. This has drawn attention to how these outsider- development agents communicate development information particularly due to the sociolinguistic situation in many rural African communities. The real concern is with is that the target majority of the people in the rural areas are not speakers of the dominant languages of the development discourse, in most cases this is the official foreign languages taught in schools.Communication is a fundamental part in community development programmes and language emerges as a key factor in effective communication and implementation of these programmes. While it is evident that social interactions are sustained by agreeable communicative principles, the role of language and the different mode of communication applied to development interventions have received very little attention from the parties concerned. This has yielded detrimental repercussions in the quality of interaction at the grassroots level. More often than not, it is assumed that once there is a common language, effective communication will take place and for this reason language use and mode of communication are never given much thought in the field of development interaction. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / The researcher has been working for CIAT, as a community development facilitator and research assistant for past five years (2001-2006). CIAT has been involved in testing tools and methods for promoting participation and tracking changes at community level under different pilot projects in Eastern and Central Africa in partnership with national research organizations of respective countries. One of CIAT’s areas of research is developing participatory monitoring and evaluation systems that are appropriate for rural communities. The researcher has been involved in designing and setting up community-driven participatory monitoring and evaluation systems on a pilot basis with communities in Eastern and Southern Africa. / South Africa

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / The concept of empowerment has become a mantra in the development discourse as a result of the redefinition of development to entail building the capacity of the people to effect change in their lives. This study is an attempt to provide insight into the impact of empowerment activity of Zonkee Community Development Centre on the participants. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research method the study illuminated on the aim and objectives of the study. The World Bank empowerment framework guided the collection of data and the data was analysed in relation to the study aim and objectives. The study findings indicate that Zonkee Community Development Centre through its activity endowed and increased different resource base of the participants and subsequently their individual growth and development. More importantly, the resources they were endowed with aided their ability to make choices and decisions that reflect their value and interest. Furthermore, the findings of the study shows that access to resources which include material and development of sense of self is indispensable for empowerment to take place. In other words power over resources without power within will fall short of bringing about requisite empowerment experience. Nevertheless, the findings point to the complexity of empowerment and unpredictability of empowerment outcomes with regards to choice making. The findings of the study in its entirety indicate that empowerment efforts by civil society group have the potential to diminish sense of powerlessness and enhance capacity of the poor to control their lives.

No abstract available / Dissertation (ML (Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

Many community development programmes are initiated without taking the community members and their needs into consideration. The question arose as to whether, by implementing Paolo Freire's theory concerning the process of conscientisation, sustainable community development could be successfully accomplished in Ivory Park, a developing community in Midrand. The conscientisation process has four components: desocialization, critical thinking, power awareness and self-organization. The participants were guided to become involved in making use of introspection, by means of which they started to find solutions to their problems. The object of this introspection was to impact their decision-making abilities and their sense of self-worth, thus empowering them to reach out to the community in an effort to combine resources in initiating community development programmes. The researcher made use of a participatory research approach during this study, in which concrete and abstract goals were identified. The concrete goals were achieved through the community development process by the participants themselves, whereas the abstract goals were realized through the process of conscientisation. These two processes are closely linked together. The data were collected by means of a tape-recorder during weekly discussions, and then transcribed to enable the researcher to describe the process of community development that took place. Using Miles and Huberman's (1994) data analysis techniques, the transcribed data were analysed according to the four categories from the process of conscientisation, i.e. desocialization, critical thinking, power awareness and self-organization. Interpretations could then be made and a conclusion drawn as to whether, by awakening a critical consciousness, sustainable community development could be initiated. In conclusion: community development programmes can be sustainable only if they have been initiated by the community itself by the implementation of Paolo Freire's process of conscientisation. Key words: process of conscientisation, desocialization, critical thinking, power awareness, self-organization, introspection, Paolo Freire, sustainable community development, participatory research, active participation. / Dissertation (M Cur (Clinical))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Nursing Science / unrestricted

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MA (Social Work))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Social Work and Criminology / Unrestricted