Poverty and inequality in South Africa are a result of the impact of apartheid policy, which inter alia stripped people of their assets, especially land, distorted economic markets and social institutions through racial discrimination, and resulted in violence and destabilization. This has shaped the nature of poverty in South Africa. In view of the above, the South African government has introduced a programme known as the Comprehensive Rural Development Strategy in order to redress the imbalances of the former apartheid regime. In this strategy it is envisaged that vibrant, equitable and sustainable rural communities and food security for all will be achieved. In this study, I investigated the implementation of rural development programmes in the Mbhashe local municipality of the Eastern Cape Province in order to determine appropriate intervention strategies. This study focused on Ward18 of Mbhashe local municipality on a village known as Nkwalini Bafazi. This is a village that has been earmarked by the government to be a pilot site for the Rural Development Programme. This project is at the initial stage of social facilitation. In other words this research project is designed to investigate the process of Rural Development and how it can be implemented in the Mbhashe Local municipality in order to alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. For the purpose of the study, a mixed research approach was chosen. This means that the study used both the qualitative and quantitative approaches for in-depth understanding and verification. Questionnaires and structured interview questions were used to collect the data. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) was also used for the purpose of observing and involving the community in the exercise. Data was collected from residents by conducting surveys, making use of questionnaires. Structured interviews were conducted with government officials (Department of Rural Development and Agrarian Reform) in order to understand the situation better.

This research report investigated the effects of a poverty alleviation project, the Cala bakery, on the community members of the Sakhisizwe Municipality in the Eastern Cape. This chapter provides a background to the study and also provides an introduction to the research report by discussing the relevance and problem statement, the research questions, sample and setting, research design and methodology and finally considers the ethical implications of the investigation. May 1997 described South Africa as being a developing nation with the majority of households in poverty, and having unequal distribution of income and wealth. Due to this, the democratic government of 1994 had adopted pro poor policy that focused on social services which its budget increases every year. Within this realm, poverty alleviation projects remained an important component of the government‟s challenge of tackling poverty (May, 1997). After almost 16 years of democracy in South Africa, poverty and unemployment remained a major challenge facing government in provision of basic services (Shasha, 2004). South Africa continued to be characterised by a large scale of unemployment and poverty in the formal sector of the economy in both rural and urban areas (Shasha & Liesle, 2004).Although there was poverty throughout South Africa, poverty was distributed unevenly among the nine provinces of the country. The Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Free State provinces have the highest poverty rates especially among the rural areas (DOS, 2009). The only people who survived poverty in the South African country were people that were well to do, people that could be able to make economic gains. Those people who were unemployed found themselves in debt, as it had been identified that a majority of homes and people do not save. This was due to being a country depending on social welfare services which resulted to disserving of people and to unsustainable levels of household debts. These debts were usually based on social, economic and psychological problems (Shasha & Liesle, 2004). In response, the South African government introduced community based projects whose operation was limited to a particular neighbourhood, and were run and managed by the local members of a community. The white paper for social welfare 1997 had encouraged the establishment of income generating projects which were run and managed by the group of community members who were predominantly unemployed people. The Department of Social Development (DOS, 2004) had further emphasised that these people had to include unemployed youth and that the project beneficiaries would not come from the same household to ensure that the initiative was touching a number of households within the community(DOS, 2004). Furthermore, these government intervention programmes aimed to reduce unemployment and poverty in South Africa by encouraging people to reduce poverty by themselves (Shasha, 2004). An example of one of these programmes was the Cala Development Project. The Cala community‟s youth had a business idea of producing baked products for the community and the surrounding areas. The purpose was to bring people together in order to reduce poverty and unemployment, specifically targeting young people who were household heads. The project has 8 beneficiaries that were committed to working together in this project, with the aim of producing baked foods.

The study sought to evaluate the extent to which poverty alleviation programmes of the Eastern Cape Provincial Department of Rural Development and Agrarian Reform (DRDAR) addressed the agricultural needs of the Ndakana community. The emphasis had been on the effectiveness with which these programmes were implemented. Ndakana Village is situated in the Nqamakwe District. The village consists of Hili-hili, Mathafeni, Ncora and Diphini locations which are approximately twenty kilometres from the rural town of Nqamakwe in Amathole District. In the Eastern Cape, several poverty alleviation programmes are implemented which should, inter alia, alleviate the phenomenon of poverty in the rural areas. Despite these programmes it, however, appears that there is very little, if any, improvement in the poverty situation. Against this background it is essential that the progress in the alleviation of poverty be evaluated and if necessary, steps be taken to ensure that the envisaged objectives be achieved. On the importance of evaluating the program, Monette et al. (2011:5) write that in the past few decades, many large, ambitious expensive programmes intended to cope with social problems and to provide services to individuals have been developed. Along with the growth of these programs has emerged an increasing concern over their results: Do they achieve their intended goals? These programs are costly, and some evaluation is needed to assess whether resources are, indeed, being used effectively. Equally important, a program that fails to achieve its goals leave a problem unresolved or a service undelivered. Monette et al. (2011:6) further regard evaluation as a use of scientific research techniques to assess the result of a program and evaluate whether the program, as currently designed, achieve its stated goals In accordance with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (1994:20), a national land reform programme is the central driving force of rural development. Such a programme aims to effectively address the injustices of the forced removals and the historical denial of access to land. The RDP aims to ensure security of tenure for rural dwellers in implementing the national land reform programme, and through the provision of support services, the South African government intends to build the economy by generating large-scale employment, increasing rural income and endeavours to eliminate overcrowding.

In today’s dynamic technological landscape, wireless communication networks have become an important part of economic development. The emergence of wireless technologies raises hopes to extend communication to remote areas that have not seen any tangible deployment to date. As developing nations pin their hopes to wireless technologies, cost models for wireless communication networks are becoming vital to support the emerging technologies. However, varying cost changes raise critical challenges to the estimation of both capital expenditure and operational expenditure. The network deployment process has numerous events that may cause adjustments to initially estimated project costs. These adjustments are necessary for a cost management plan and this plan includes monitoring cost performance and ensuring that only appropriate changes are made to the network project. The incidents that may cause cost changes can not be entirely predicted as their distribution tend to change dynamically from time to time. Estimating network deployment costs in such a dynamic environment necessitates cost models that can adapt to random occurrence of cost changes. Widely used cost models are usually performed by experienced personnel whose engineering experience is derived from deploying similar networks. In this approach experienced personnel add a certain percentage to the cost estimate to cater for contingency costs. Certainly such an approach depends on individual opinion, making it subjective and void of mathematical estimating relationships which are of paramount importance in ensuring that estimated deployment costs are sufficient to deal with cost uncertainties. We observe that existing approaches can only explore a limited solution space and hence can lead to cost overruns if implemented in dynamically cost changing environments. This thesis presents a wireless communication network deployment cost model that incorporates uncertainties into the final cost estimate. The model is adaptive to unpredictable cost changes since it allows adjustments of confidence levels when calculating contingency costs. This allows dynamically updating the cost changes without the cost model being reconstructed from scratch. We make use of the Poisson process in modeling the occurrence of incidents that are responsible for causing cost changes during network deployment. We also show that the occurrence of the incidents causing cost change are random and tend to follow the Poisson distribution. Using different levels of confidence we model various cost contingencies and make sensitivity analyses to identify the probability of cost overrun when given different contingencies. The dynamic adaptive cost model can be used either at the strategic level to understand the cost of a particular technique or at the operational level, as a way to show how Poisson process in network deployment can compare with engineering experience and other estimating techniques. We believe that the model is useful for remote areas where deployment costs are volatile and the distribution of incidents causing cost change to original cost estimates are diverse and dynamically changing. Further we expect that our research improves the knowledge base of information about the costs for rural communities to connect to the Internet, consequently providing useful input to future policy debates. This work is further poised to be a utility function to help those planning internet infrastructure deployments in least developed regions.

The broad objective of the study is to investigate the impact of Land and Agrarian reforms on poverty alleviation in Joubertina. Purposive sampling method (non-probability sampling) was carried out mainly on two groups of people, land reform beneficiary in Jay Dee Rovon and non-beneficiary in Mon Desire. Moreover, the stratified random sampling method was also applied in Jay Dee Rovon to choose a sample of 60 households from 129 land reform beneficiaries in Jay Dee Rovon and simple random sample of 60 applied to Mon Desire household subsistence. Binary Logistic Regression model was used to test factors that influenced beneficiary on level of production. Results indicated that age and farming experience were significant variables. Age had a negative coefficient value, meaning an increase in age was less likely to cause beneficiary to produce at commercial level. Descriptive statistics revealed that farming activities in the study areas seems to be performed mostly by relatively medium age people followed by younger people and lastly by the older people. Moreover, farming experience with positive coefficient revealed that it is highly likely to influence the beneficiary to produce at commercial for marketing. The older the farmer the more the experience s/he had in farming activities. However, descriptive revealed, medium and young age people with little knowledge tend to be more active than older people on farming activities but on the other hand they are more capable of carrying out physical activities. The results revealed that land reform beneficiaries likely to influence the level of production for marketing while non-beneficiaries produce for home consumption and little for sale in local market. An improvement on yield results an increase on income and thus leading to a change in ownership of household’s durable assets. An increase in yield also indirectly results employment recreation, increasing real wage and improve farm income thus leading to poverty reduction in JDR as compare to MD. The study recommends that the government should also assist non-beneficiaries in MD with agricultural infrastructure to improve their level of production and food security at household level.

M.A. (Development Studies) / This investigation was conducted in a transitional phase of South Africa's political dispensation. The emphasis on "transformation" in the new dispensation, promises to have far-reaching consequences for the development of people in communities. The achievement of the obj ectives of the community development approach, which is currently being used in South Africa as a development strategy, can lead to a better quality of life for people living in informal settlements (squatter communities) if communi ty development (as a development strategy) is applied succesfully. Against this background, a study was conducted in Finetown (see location map : annexture 1) on which this inquiry is especially focussing. In the second instance, Finetown serves as an example of an informal settlement, in the hope of general ising some of the findings and recommendations. Two readiness models for community development, in particular the model of Levi and Litwin (1986 : 31-35) as well as the model of Conyers and Raul (1990 : 127-138) is used as the study's starting point. The readiness indicators that could be identified from the literature study, was applied on two groups of respondents (namely the facilitators and the members of the Finetown communi ty). The findings of the literature study are thus compared to the investigation in Finetown to firstly, "place" Finetown on a readiness scale and, secondly, expand the available knowledge of a "readiness model" for community facilitating in such communities. This investigation is therefore based on a literature study,questionnaires, informal interviewing and observations in Finetown. These sources of data are used to compare the objectives of the community development strategy with the community's current perceptions of community development. The researcher comes to the conclusion that, allthough both the community facilitators and the community perceive the readiness indicators as relevant for the community's development, the former cherishes higher expectations about the indicators than the latter. The main objective of this study was thus to, firstly, identify indicators for community development and, secondly, test them in Finetown. Thirdly, additional indicators were identified for inclosure with the existing indicators. Hereby a contribution is hopefully made to the eventual development of a model which could be used to evaluate the level of readiness of communities for community development and through which a more effective use of scarce recources for development can be made

MPM / Oliver Tambo Institute of Governance and Policy Studies

Thesis (M. Dev. (Development and Planning)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / The central emphasis of this study was to investigate the determinant of public participation in Integrated Development Planning (IDP) of Polokwane Local Municipality, Limpopo Province. To this culmination, precise working objectives were formulated as follows: to study the typologies and processes of public participation; to explore the roles of stakeholders in public participation; To examine the phases in Integrated Development Planning and to examine the levels of public participation in Integrated Development Planning. This dissertation studies the determinant of public participation in Integrated Development Planning. Douglas Huber (2008); Franks, Sharma, and Dayaratna (2004); Kimathi (2016) found that there is a positive relationship between public participation in the Integrated Development Planning locally and globally. From a South African perspective, the study shows that public participation is the strongest element for successful development planning. To operationalise this study, descriptive statistics were used to analyse data and data analysis was performed using inferential statistics mainly correlation and linear regression. The data collected from the Capricorn District Municipality Socio-Economic Impact Assessment Study of Integrated Development Planning (2012) was analysed using the 2013 Microsoft Excel Software for raw data and Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) to compute variables that represent the determinants of public participation in Integrated Development Planning into factors. The results of this study show that generally, there is a strong positive relationship with public participation in Integrated Development Planning in Polokwane Local Municipality with an average magnitude of 0.75 correlation. However, the most interesting discovery is that the economic factor is a determinant of public participation in Integrated Development Planning in Polokwane Local Municipality.

Thesis (M. Dev. (Planning and Development)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / In 1997, the South African Government introduced a White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service. This was to re-emphasis on the performance enhancing role of management in the implementation of service delivery mandates. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of management in implanting service delivery initiatives for community development in Vhembe District Municipality, Limpopo Province South Africa. The methodology of this study was largely a qualitative case study and the quantitative approach was also used to augment the qualitative findings. The study was undertaken in the Vhembe District Municipality by engaging various administrative managers, ward councillors and traditional leaders. In sourcing the information for this research, semistructured interviews were conducted with 20 administrative managers, ten traditional leaders and ten ward councillors. The research findings identified the need for the management to take the leading role in service delivery initiatives in order to address the service delivery challenges in local government. Traditional leaders and ward councillors need to enhance the public participation process to ensure the community is on board regarding the progress of their respective projects and planning processes.

Bibliography: pages 191-199. / Black people in South Africa have been the targets - or victims - of massive development intervention by successive South African governments. And in more recent years urbanised Africans in particular have been the targets of increasing levels of development intervention, much of which has been funded and directed through bilateral aid programmes initiated by western governments. It is with those kinds of development intervention that this thesis is concerned. Research, conducted during 1989 and 1990, examined a slice of development activity occurring in an African urban area during what is becoming a period of transition from South Africa's effective isolation to the beginning of its reincorporation into the world "development system".