The aim of this research was to gain an understanding of the general perceptions, barriers, and facilitators to seeking mental health care among young adults in Maputo, Mozambique. In the context of the pandemic, semi-structured interviews were conducted using the voice note feature on the mobile application WhatsApp. Participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling, with the initial participants originating from a social media-led mental health organisation based in the city. The participants' ages ranged from nineteen to thirty and all identified as female. The study employed a phenomenological approach and used theoretical models such as the Behavioural Model of Health Service Utilisation and the Social Identity Perspective to conceptualise and analyse the data. In comparison to studies of mental health help-seeking both globally and in low to middle-income countries, the participants shared similar perceptions surrounding perceived attitudinal and structural barriers and facilitators to seeking mental health care. Participants provided accounts of the different attitudinal barriers such as stigma, societal norms, and perceptions of care. Perceived structural barriers included the availability and affordability of care, with the latter pertaining to private services. Although barriers such as stigma and cultural and religious norms did not directly affect most participants, the importance of addressing them in the broader public was acknowledged. Facilitating factors for seeking care, such as social support, financial alternatives, and access to information proved to assist help-seekers in their search for care. The benefits of the internet and social media as sources of information and network were outlined. From this research, it was concluded that multiple aspects of the help-seeking process may be improved to increase better outcomes for those who need care. Increasing public mental health literacy in a socio-culturally sensitive manner, standardising care, and creating more mental health services in clinics and places of employment or education may contribute to the ease of people's journey to look after their mental health.

This research study sought to identify the parenting styles employed by parents/caregivers enrolled in a parenting programme conducted by a non-profit organisation named Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation in the Delft community, as well as the various factors that influenced their parenting styles. Additionally, the study sought to gauge the effectiveness of Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation's parenting programme which was achieved in the form of a minor programme evaluation. This research study employed a qualitative research methodology and made use of semi-structured interviews to elicit the data required to fulfil the desired objectives. The study population comprised 82 parents/caregivers enrolled in Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation's Parenting Programme, and from there a sample of 20 female parents/caregivers were selected using simple random sampling. Additionally, the sample included a combination of biological parents and social parents/caregivers such as grandmothers and aunts. Research findings revealed that the vast majority of the parents/caregivers enrolled in Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation's parenting programme employed an authoritative approach to child rearing with the exception of one participant who displayed more authoritarian tendencies. These findings can be attributed to the participant's upbringing which was a key factor in influencing their parenting style, followed by child temperament. Additionally, the participants' reported that Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation's parenting programme positively influenced their parenting practices as they described an improvement in their relationships with their children. Moreover, the participants demonstrated a shift in their beliefs and practices surrounding parenting as they had discarded their former practices for more proactive practices, such as non-punitive discipline methods, recommended by Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation. Lastly, recommendations were provided to various stakeholders, including Sakha Isizwe Development Organisation, similar establishments conducting parenting programmes, and government. These recommendations include establishing interventions directed at facilitating family reconciliation, supporting parents of troubled adolescents, increasing efforts directed at recruiting more fathers into their parenting programmes, and addressing the absent father phenomenon plaguing low-income communities in South Africa.

Youth violence has been troubling the South African society ever since the country's transition to democracy in 1994. Although the problem has been a countrywide phenomenon, certain provinces and cities, predominantly black inhabited townships in the City of Cape Town, have been most afflicted by the new form of youth violence, code-named ‘Gurans'. Cases of Gurans-related violence first appeared in the City of Cape Town's townships around the year 2000 and have exponentially increased. Of these townships, Khayelitsha has been the most afflicted. While there has been significant scholarly attention to this new form of violence, little has been done to expose the finer grains of the factors that cause the problem. Moreso, little attention has been channelled towards documenting the perspectives and feelings of the perpetrators, victims, school children, community members, and educators working in those communities. Lack of such detailed investigations has derailed its eradication. As such, the aim of this study was to proffer new understandings on how youth-related violence have suddenly morphed into the new Gurans phenomenon and how this has affected the community of Khayelitsha in its entirety. This study therefore highlights the centrality of the theories of Social Identity and Violentisation to analysing and understanding violence among youths in contemporary South Africa. A qualitative research design was applied, involving eight focus group discussions with 106 affected youths, 10 interviews with crew members in Gurans, 5 educators from four different schools in Khayelitsha, and 5 community members of Khayelitsha township. This thesis documents Gurans as a new type of youth violence with specific focus on its meaning, causes, effects, as well as the issues and key players that have been involved in its sustenance. This study culminates in policy implications and initiatives that take on board how the violent youths, families, communities and government must conduct themselves to alleviate the problem. It is further suggested the most critical step necessary in the quest to eradicate the scourge of youth violence from communities is for the society to first understand the personal experiences of youth living in malignant communities, which encourages youth to become violent and to associate with violent groups. Such an approach will help to understand the underlying circumstances on why more youth are turning to violence, why they are devising new methods to mete such violence and as well as the broad effects of the violence.

This qualitative study was undertaken in Northern Uganda, specifically in the districts of Gulu, Lira, and Kitgum. The researcher spent a total of six months collecting field data (over a period of 2 years) from key members of community-based peacebuilding groups as well as from the groups' beneficiaries. This study conceptualised gender from a decolonial, intersectional framing of femininities which considered lineage, age, class, and geographic location of women who founded peace groups during and just after some of the most volatile periods of the war in Northern Uganda. The researcher theorised how women's small- scale community interventions manifested as part of broader peacebuilding efforts undertaken by larger institutions such as government and international development organisations that were present in Northern Uganda at the time of the study. Based on in-depth interviews with seventeen founders and staff of six community-based peace groups as well as seven focus group discussions with 76 beneficiaries, the study explored shifting gendered subjectivities performed across multiple roles and identities. The data collected was further enhanced by follow-on interviews with seven people who worked with larger aid organisations that interacted with the six community-based peace groups. The researcher reviewed organisational documents such as project reports and minutes of staff meetings to corroborate research participants' narration of their community work. Using thematic analysis, the study deconstructs participants' ‘gendered' meanings of peacebuilding. The findings from this study suggest that an African feminist perspective to peacebuilding requires the following: a nuanced intersectional analysis of women's socio-economic and political power within militarised contexts; foregrounding local efforts to build peace by focusing on gendered experiences of survival; a recognition of militarism as a social and economic system that is often intertwined with colonial histories of violence as well as patriarchal values and customs that present masculine power as normative; and finally, unpacking shifts in gendered power, especially with regard to markers of socio-economic and political power.

In this study, the main goal was to explore youth experiences and perceptions of peer social support in the Western Cape region of South Africa at the Chrysalis Academy youth programme. The youth in the Western Cape face many obstacles to their development such as gangsterism, drugs, unemployment, lack of social support, volatile living environments and insufficient positive youth development programmes. It was assumed in this study that positive peer social support aligns with the ‘stress-buffer' model which claims social support as a buffer to these types of stressful live events and situations. This study sought to magnify the phenomena of peer social support versus the more researched phenomena of parental and teacher support. Research has emphasised parental and teacher support as playing more important roles of social support buffers for youth. The other goal of this study was to explore the ways in which this social support helps to foster resiliency and positive youth development. This study aimed to add to existing research on youth development by providing personal experiences youth had with peers; a facet of social support the researcher assumed was overlooked and was lacking overall in the context of South Africa. This would aid in creating a more in depth understanding of the role of peer support in youth development and help to create programmes and policies that utilise peer support as a main pillar in development to foster resiliency for youth. To this end, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with twenty participants who lived in different communities throughout Cape Town and the surrounding areas. The participants were graduates of the youth development programme at the Chrysalis Academy; a programme that integrates peer support into their development framework.

People with physical disabilities are largely excluded from the mainstream of society by barriers that prevent their participation. This is particularly so in disadvantaged communities where the disabled are the poorest and most vulnerable of the population. The aims of this study were to determine and explore the nature and extent of the barriers confronting the disabled with permanent locomotor disabilities; improve their quality of life as well as that of their caregivers by providing them with wheelchairs, mobility aids, assistive devices and concrete ramps and pathways; and propose a model Integrated Intervention Programme that could be used in similar disadvantaged communities throughout South Africa. Includes bibliographical references (pages 300-341).

This dissertation is a theoretical and textual analysis of the discursive practice of young leaders in Tanzania, as a means to understand the dominant representations of a group that plans to take over the leadership of the country In the future. Representations are collective discursive formations conditioned by historical possibilities and cultural context. The exploratofy approach adopts Constructivism as a major philosophical paradigm for social realities and presents a case study of twenty-five participants who are young political leaders operating in Tanzania and trainees on the Youth Leadership Training Programme (YLTP), run by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German not-for-profit organization guided by democratic values. All of the participants had 'leadership' positions In their own orginizations. In 2003, they were interviewed and wrote essays on different topics related to leadership in Tanzania, while I was living in that country and working as short-term trainer for the YLTP. As a member of the team of trainers of the first YLTP, I was invited to lead its end-of.programme evaluation, the results of which left open questions regarding the relationship between Tanzanian history and cultural contexts, and the choice of curriculum and method of the YLTP. This research intends, in its analysis of the issues raised by these questions, to contribute to the future design of leadership-training programmes in Tanzania. There are two parts: part I, 'the researcher, the object and the method' gives an account of my philosophical trajectory, formulates the epistemological foundations upon which the analysis is built, and proposes a methodological tool that has not been used in the English-speaking world yet: the discourse of the collective subject (DCS). Conventional explanations ignore the power of discourse and its role in construction, maintenance and resistance to ideologies. The choice of discourse analysis aims at unveiling the Tanzanian culture-specific ideological constructions and the powers that, in interaction, frame and mediate discourses and meaning-making. Part II searches for those 'relationships between history, social representations and contemporary discourses of young leaders', showing how the ideological forces operating in Tanzania determine rules of formation for the young leaders' discourses. Three types of dominant discourses are articulated among the young leaders. One, which I named humanistic discourse, is framed by constructions of socialism and Ujamaa, brotherhood, egalitarianism and Pan-Africanism. This dominant discursive practice is, however, interspersed with liberal discourses, which frame the world within streams of the modernization paradigm, reconstructing meanings in Tanzania. Both discursive practices are found to be mediated by a patriarchal discourse, which weaves through old and new representations of the young leaders in that country. The analysis of the discourses and the conclusions regarding social representations helped develop some recommendations in the form of insights for future leadership-training programmes In Tanzania. Those recommendations aim particularly at linking the domain of the 'personal' to the domain of the 'political', both found to pertain to different, and sometimes conflicting, genres and narratives among the young leaders.

This study analyses the perspectives about 'good leadership' as spelt out by an outstanding African leader, Julius Karnbarage Nyerere, who ruled Tanzania from independence in 1962 until 1985, and influenced African history until his death in 1999. This research reveals an exciting and interesting time in politics and social development in Africa, and puts questions forward in order to unveil Nyerere's perspectives on leadership. The particular period investigated is the decade of the 1960s, the critical time of independence and nation building. The study is composed of two parts, the understanding of the context of Tanzania's development, and the hermeneutical analysis of Nyerere's perspectives. To understand Nyerere in his context, I randomly selected seven authentic speeches and a handpicked one. I used content analysis (manifest and latent coding) and hermeneutics as my methodological approaches. Key-concepts explored in the study were Democracy, Development, Unity and Peace, and Leadership. The underlying assumption of this study is that 'good leadership' is needed to promote participation, democracy and socio~economic development, creating national stability. The research proves this assumption right. The qualitative character of the research does not allow for generalisation of the results, which is limited by the small sample of speeches. However, recent challenges of economic globalisation and its impact on the 'poor' countries remind us of the social and political responsibility of leaders. Understanding the importance of good leadership for development is one of Nyerere's legacies. Political leadership has to be learnt. Core to the research was a "dialogue' between Nyerere, in his historical, political and personal context, and I, in mine. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a prominent henneneuticaJ philosopher. taught me how to understand first, in order to interpret and then to influence social reality. I have developed a methodological technique, the 'triple•jump', to understand and to interpret the text and to approach the 'truth'. The central research question, "what in Nyerere's perspective is a good lead.er for democratic development?" could be answered through the study: a leader has to be ethical, reliable, knowledgeable, decisive, accountable, humble, hard working and socially responsible. Nyerere's perspectives on good leadership also serve as guidance to contemporary political leaders, who are committed to democratic development. It is hoped that the results of this study will enrich the Youth Leadership Training Programme (YL TP) in Tanzania and other leadership training programmes elsewhere in Africa.

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