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

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No description available.

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Sociology, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-282).

This research focused on determining the roles and institutional arrangements for economic regulation of urban water services in Sub- Saharan Africa. Urban water service delivery mainly supplied by state owned utilities is constrained due to many factors one of which is related to insufficient or lack of a clear economic regulatory framework. The research used a multiple case study approach and systematically analysed the roles and institutional arrangements of economic regulation of urban water services in three countries of Ghana, Mozambique and Zambia. Based on literature as the source of information, the research developed the existing political and socio-economic environment in the different countries which can affect the design and determination of the roles and institutional arrangements for economic regulation. A further analysis was made of the perceptions on the roles and institutional arrangements of the regulatory framework in the Sub-Saharan African context through a questionnaire distributed beyond the three case countries. The study obtained primary data from focus group discussions, key informant interviews, official documents and observations. Lessons obtained through literature from regulatory institutions in other continents have also been included and these are Jamaica, Latvia, Jakarta in Indonesia, and England and Wales. The factors which can affect the roles and institutional arrangements of economic regulation of urban water services were divided into three groups as: including country governance, socioeconomic and sectoral factors. Country governance factors, which include political stability and fragility, are a key factor in the decision of whether to establish a regulatory agency. On the other hand, socio-economic factors influence the focus or areas which must not be ignored by economic regulation. The third type of factors which include the robustness of a policy framework, and performance levels of utilities, affect the effectiveness and efficiency of an economic regulator. Based on the evidence from the research, economic regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa should address five key roles, which are [i] approval of tariffs that will lead to service providers achieving commercial viability, [ii] "consumer protection" [iii] monitoring and enforcing performance standards, [iv] setting up of a knowledge bank on urban water services, and [v] ensuring that the poor gain sustained access to water services. There are a number of specific regulatory functions within each role. Sub-Saharan African countries are in a unique situation where the urban poor comprise as much as 60% of the urban population and so cannot be ignored in the design of a regulatory framework. The conclusion from this research is that in order to achieve the perceived benefits of economic regulation of urban water services in Sub-Saharan Africa, and subject to conducive and appropriate political and socio-economic environment, the more appropriate institutional arrangements is an autonomous regulatory agency. The autonomy of the regulatory agency will be enhanced if it has its own legal status, and is able to develop, manage and control its own budget financed from a regulatory fee charged on the regulated water providers. Governments should be willing to relinquish regulatory decision making powers to this non-political and non-governmental body. The reporting and appointing mechanisms for the board could also have an influence on the autonomy of the regulator. The research further concludes that economic regulation of urban water services is a necessary but perhaps not sufficient condition for efficient and effective delivery of urban water services. It is not a panacea to the enormous problems of urban water services but can play a very effective role. The research has further found that it is too early to determine the impact of utility regulation on the performance levels of utilities in those countries that have a clearly defined regulatory framework. Utility regulation is still in its infancy in Sub-Saharan Africa and its impact is therefore a subject for further research.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Urban Planning and Environmental Management / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis studies the social history of the poor in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, between 1960 and 2005. This is accomplished by focusing on the housing and unemployment crises they faced and the manifest reluctance of authorities to either provide enough housing or to accept mushrooming informal housing and economic activities in response to these acute shortages. I attempt to highlight the fragility of the poor’s claim to the right to permanent urban residency emphasizing inadequate state funding and poverty and continuities in some discourses from colonial to the post colonial era as factors responsible for spreading and sustaining the discrimination against low income earners in the city. These included authorities’ perceptions that all Africans belonged to rural areas, have access to land, and that low income Africans were immoral and unclean. While these perceptions tended to be fuelled by the racial divide between whites and blacks during the colonial period, class and gender dynamics among Africans crisscrossed that racial divide. After independence, while these perceptions were still alive, central government policy ambitions and failures were instrumental in influencing the welfare and fate of the urban masses and their relations with the former middle class Africans and nationalist leaders who assumed power in 1980. It becomes clear that there was a misunderstanding by authorities on how most of the rural land was not able to support some families because of infertility or lack of resources to successfully till the land by most some families. The overall conclusion is that poor people’s rights to permanent residency were elusive up to 2005 and their living and survival space has been continuing to shrink in the city.

Despite the attention given to the role of the housing market in the constitution and duration of low-income minority neighborhoods in American cities, little is known about the inner-workings of the housing market within these neighborhoods. The kind of housing professionals that populate this local economic world, the strategies they develop, both orthodox and unorthodox, especially towards tenants, are deemed of little interest by the dominant perspectives in the field, Human Ecology and Political Economy. The shared intellectual movement behind these two widely different theoretical perspectives is to understand how the city is mapped, how people and activities come to be distributed in space across the city. In this agenda, low-income minority areas are seen as a residual geographical entity, something whose existence is the effect of external forces: real estate brokers who steer households according to race, white ethnic immigrants who flee to the suburbs, white middle-class youths who gentrify the inner-city, downtown elites who disinvest from low-income minority neighborhoods. To focus on local actors of the housing market who operate within low-income minority neighborhoods requires a shift away from the traditional question of spatial distribution. Instead of framing the housing market as a spatial mechanism, this research looks at the housing market as a set of varied economic circuits that plug into a local social life with the goal of extracting money out of a local population's housing needs. In this view, the empirical questions are the variety of economic circuits in which the poor and near-poor minorities are embedded; the economic roles that define these various circuits; the strategies that are adequate, both for housing actors and for the local population; the opportunities for upward mobility and the risks of downward mobility they offer; the experience of hardship that emerges from these circuits. In brief, the key issue is how the different modes of organization of a local housing field (a term more open to variations than "market") participate to the local process of economic differentiation in low-income minority neighborhoods. The process under study can be conceived as the mutual shaping between two linked ecologies (Abbott 2005). On one hand, there are small and independent local housing professionals. For these actors, the issue is: how can they meet the specific challenges and seize the specific profits that stem from the economic project of making money out of the housing needs of poor and near-poor minorities? On the other hand, there is the ecology of the local population living in these neighborhoods. This population is internally differentiated by class and by a myriad of support networks, which may include formal organizations, such as lawyers, community based organizations, religious organizations, or legal aid societies. For this population, the key question is: how to benefit best from the housing field they face with the variety of resources at their hands? The interactions of these two ecologies with the larger regulatory framework shape the economic circuits that make up the housing field in low-income minority neighborhoods. The outcome of such interactive process can be approached from the inside - i.e. the inner-workings of the economic circuits as seen by those who derive money from them. It can also be seen from the outside - i.e. the economic structures that people living in these communities face. For almost three years (2009-2012), I was embedded into an informal group of housing actors operating in central Brooklyn and central Harlem, NY. This group is made of small landlords, larger real estate investors, independent real estate brokers, several housing lawyers and a criminal lawyer, construction workers and handymen, local community leaders, and, more marginally, New York City agents and bureaucrats and tenants. My research is an ethnographic study of this group, which I call "Larry's clique". It yielded three main results. First, the local housing field in low-income minority neighborhoods is segmented between the "housing market" and the "housing game". In the "housing market" economic dynamics fall within the boundary of institutional regulations. Roles and strategies are encapsulated in common terms like "tenant", "landlord", "housing lawyer", "real estate broker" etc. Next to this institutionalized housing market, exists a predatory segment, which, following the people I have observed, I call the "housing game". In this second segment, institutionally-proscribed modes of making money are common, formal economic roles are transformed and new categories emerge such as "the professional tenant", "the foolish landlord", "the predatory machine", "the tenant who plays the game right"; new boundaries between fair and unfair business practices are drawn; and the texture of ordinary economic transactions is not one of middle-class doux-commerce, but one of incivility and verbal violence. Second, the housing game sheds a new light on the local economic life in which poor and near-poor minorities are embedded. I have observed the formation of patrons-clients ties between local housing actors of the "game" and the local population. Patron-clients ties are a classic structure in the social scientific literature. However, it is a vocabulary that has disappeared from the scholarship on the contemporary forms of American poverty and near-poverty. My research brings back this vocabulary. Associated to this form of relation is a particular experience of hardship. The poor and near-poor who come in contact with the housing game experience the world as full of concealed riches that can be unlocked through personal yet distrustful relations of dependency. In this worldview, people shift quickly from being friend to being foe, double-agents are constant worries, simple questions as who works for whom receive unstable answers, and hubristic anger and joy accompany expectations of high rewards, of rainfalls of money, and feelings of being robbed. In this deeply personalistic worldview, something key is obliterated from the eyes of the people: it is the marginality of most of the actors I have observed from larger formal organizations and bureaucracies that chiefly affect the distribution of economic rewards in the housing market. Third, the housing game is not a well-ordered underworld in the tradition of the Chicago School. It is not a sub economic system with its own parallel culture and practices. The real mode of existence of this economic world has much less substance. Economic actors in the housing game are haunted by feelings of inefficacy and amateurism. Beyond the scams, the predatory attempts, the shouts and the insults in Housing Court, beyond the moralizing discourses about who "abuses the system" and who deserves to be "fucked", beyond all this gesticulation, people of the game have the nagging feeling of being stalled. The economic life of the housing game fights by all means necessary the actors' creeping experience of passivity, helplessness, and low self-efficacy - but it is not always successful. The vocabulary of the "game" indicates not only the distance with the institutionalized housing market, but also the dramaturgy of this economic world, the layers of meaning and symbolic practices that cover up, but only in part, the fact that the game does not fully work, does not bring the expected rewards. The concealed riches of the world remain out of reach. The intellectual posture behind this research is the reconstruction of economic categories through intimate ethnographic observations. Such reconstruction requires an epoch (i.e. a suspension) of the common modes of description of economic life inherited from both economics and legal studies and from the regulatory framework that supervises the "market". This research is the occasion, then, to interrogate the place of rich narratives and close descriptions in the study of economic life.

No description available.