The global population is ageing, and with it has been a growth of mature aged participation in sport. Following this trend, swimming amongst the adult population in South Africa, whether it is for recreation or competitive purposes, has increased. This research reports on the coaching strategies used by one coach who is training Masters swimmers in Johannesburg. It examines whether or not andragogical principles and teaching methods could be applied to an informal swimming coaching context. Qualitative methods were used for data collection, including an interview with the coach, focus group discussions with the swimmers, pool deck observations and video recordings of the training sessions. Results indicated that adult education principles could be applied to an informal swimming coaching context through flexible and accommodating coaching practices, ensuring effective communication between the swimmer and the coach and utilising the community of practice between the swimmers and coaches to ensure effective adult learning.

Social protection is a means of reducing vulnerability on individuals by protecting them against low or declining living standards. This study examines social protection arrangements for mineworkers who retired from the South African mines on account of disabling mine injuries. Over the years, the mining industry has been the source of employment for Lesotho men. Some of the workers have been exposed to occupational injuries that led to their disability and forced retirement. They are thus forced to return to Lesotho where they become dependent on the compensation that they receive from South Africa through Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act. The study sought to determine the adequacy of compensation paid to Basotho mineworkers who retired because of disabling mine injuries in Maseru urban. It also investigated existence of complementary social support systems. A qualitative design was utilised in this study as the intention was to obtain in-depth information from the research participants concerning existing social protection arrangements. Semi-structured interview schedule were conducted with both mine workers who retired on account of disabling mine injuries and key informants. The research sample consisted of 47 mine workers who retired on account of disabling mine injuries and 4 key informants that were drawn from the Department of Social Welfare, Ministry of Labour, TEBA (The Employment Bureau of Africa) and National Union of Mine workers. The findings reveal that retired mine workers use most of their compensation income on household expenditures such as food, electricity and fuel. The compensation income ranges from M400 to M5, 000 per month. For the research participants who are at the lower range, the compensation is not adequate because they are below the poverty line. The findings established that the waiting period for compensation was long because only three research participants received their compensation after a waiting period of up to 5 months while the majority waited for more than 5 months. The findings also indicate that the payment of monthly compensation is consistent and paid timely. The results revealed that retired mine workers rely on alternative coping strategies like income generating projects and informal support from relatives and friends. The findings also reveal that the disability status makes it difficult for the beneficiaries to engage in income generating activities thereby exposing them to poverty and income insecurity. The study recommends that government support should be extended to retired mine workers with low compensation income. The study also suggests the introduction of reintegration programmes that would improve the quality of life for retired mineworkers with physical disabilities.

There is a general conformity in employment discourses that informal employment is not welcomed in the employment circles regardless of how well marketed it could be. The government of South Africa on its state owned projects in the construction industry introduced policies that promoted local labour procurement of employees a process that has resulted with heavy contestations due to its application. This study examines the impact of local labour procurement policy on locally recruited employees and those who got retrenched purely for the purpose of accommodating the policy requirement. This is done through the use of Kusile power station as a case study. It adopts qualitative research approach using interviews and document analysis. The study also examines this policy in conjunction with the current labour legislation and the effects it has on the existing labour and the proposed amendment labour bills. It also examines the motive behind the introduction of the policy and who has benefited from it. However the findings reveal that there is inconsistence in the application of the policy. The purpose why the policy was introduced is to reduce unemployment poverty in the areas where these projects are being constructed. Further also the study reveals that in as much as the policy promotes informal employment, this type of informal employment is different from the commonly well-known informal employment purely on the aspect of remuneration and benefits compared to the common one.

This research study examines the experiences of service workers in the informal economy by exploring informal hairdressing operations within the Johannesburg CBD. Drawing on ethnography at a hairsalon in Braamfontein and semi-­‐structured interviews with hairdressers, customers, hairsalon owners and City of Johannesburg officials, it argues that the emotional and affective labour in this kind of work offers hairdressers an important basis for them to weave meaning into their work. The affective relationships that they create through hairdressing present them with the potential for the self-­‐constitution of their work and lives.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management (ENVC) Johannesburg, 2017 / The ability of immigrants to craft successful livelihoods in the harsh economic climate that seems to overwhelm the local population has led to them being blamed for the unfortunate plight of South Africa’s poor, with the result that there has been targeted violence on immigrants in recent years. Informal sector entrepreneurship is at the heart of this with immigrants said to be outperforming local entrepreneurs, and taking away the last option of earning an income. Entrepreneurship is quoted as the only lasting solution to the poverty and unemployment that plagues developing countries. The ability of immigrants to succeed in a sector that is considered unproductive is worth investigating. In this study, cross sectional data is used to compare the antecedents of Entrepreneurial Performance between foreign Immigrants and South Africans. The findings are that, while both group’s performance is affected by Entrepreneurial Action; South African performance is driven mainly by deprivation, a factor that has no effect on immigrants. This puts the recent explosive response of local entrepreneurs to immigrant competition into perspective, and necessitates interventions that will, not only curb further xenophobic violence, but up-skill local entrepreneurs and enable them to make a living out of informal sector entrepreneurship. Contrary to popular belief, none of the population’s performance was linked to Social Capital. There is no use allowing people into the country only to stifle their ability to sustain themselves. Immigrant Entrepreneurship is a reality that South Africa needs to embrace. / MT2017

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management specialising in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation Johannesburg, 2016 / The establishment and growth of informal traders in South Africa have been attributed with a considerable need and desire for these informal economies to achieve economic growth, create sustainable entrepreneurial opportunities, assist with employment opportunities, etc. A number of factors have an impact on how these informal traders can become competitive and formalised, and one of these enablers is the influence of ICT interventions by informal economies to improve business performance. The purpose of this research was to establish the perceived relationship between the influence of ICT usage by informal traders and the perceived impact on business performance. The intended objective was to assess whether the perception of ICT adoption by informal traders had a positive or negative business performance outcome. The research methodology adopted was a quantitative approach, which was guided by a positivist paradigm. The population targeted were informal traders in the Sandton region of Johannesburg, South Africa. A questionnaire was distributed to gather data. The influence of ICT and the perceived impact within informal traders in the Sandton region revealed some findings consistent with existing literature. It was the overall accepted perception that ICT adoption has a perceived positive impact on business performance, including but not limited to market share, products, and customer service, as measured in the research. A deeper analysis is required to understand why the respondents in the research overwhelmingly state that the influence of ICT adoption has a perceived positive impact on performance, market share, and product and customer service. / MT2016

Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of the Witwatersrand, July 2017 / Just over ten years ago on night of the 28th of August 2006, angry mobs took to the streets of Masiphumelele township outside Fish Hoek, near Cape Town, and attacked and looted foreign national spaza shops in the neighbourhood. The attacks shocked the city, and prompted the provincial government to initiate an intervention to address the underlying causes of the violence. The outcome comprised an agreement between foreign national and South African spaza shopkeepers that permitted foreign nationals to return on condition that they did not open any new shops in the township. These mediation efforts comprised the beginning of many governance interventions in Cape Town and across the country that were aimed at curtailing foreign national spaza shops in South Africa. This thesis examines formal and informal attempts to govern foreign national spaza shops in South Africa, and seeks to understand what they reveal about the nature of politics in South Africa, as a postcolonial and developing country. In doing so it locates itself in the theoretical framework of law and society, as it examines legal phenomena from a social science perspective. Its findings are based on case study methodology involving qualitative interviews with key participants and stakeholders, as well as document collection, participant observation, and media reports. The research finds that many governance actors’ anxieties towards foreign national spaza shops relate less to shopkeepers’ particular activities and more to South African traders’ abilities to incite local socio-economic discontent against these shops, and thereby threaten political establishments. However, governance interventions rarely unfolded as intended due to resistance by competing interest groups who sought to advance their private economic concerns rather than public and political rights. This invokes features of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of the ‘social’ or ‘biopolitics’, which argue that the entry of economic concerns into the political sphere is characteristic of the modern age. The thesis therefore reflects on Arendt, Foucault and Agamben’s theories in assessing what governance efforts reveal about the nature of South Africa’s political sphere. It finds that the social realm in South Africa differs from their accounts in two significant respects. First, the social sphere is conflicted between various economic goals – with parties seeking to foster basic life and sustenance, as well as to advance the emancipation of citizens from the colonial legacies of apartheid through economic mobility and opportunity. This makes finding a path to advance overall economic advancement in the country more difficult and contentious. / XL2018

Following international trends, statistics is a relatively new addition to the South African mathematics curriculum at school level and its implementation was fraught with problems. Since 2001 teaching statistics in the Further Education and Training Phase (Grades 10 to 12) has been optional due to lack of professional development of teachers. From 2014 teaching statistics will be compulsory. This study is therefore timely as it provides information about different discourses in discussions of an ill-structured problem in a data-rich context, as well as in discussions of the meaning of the statistical mean. A qualitative case study of informal statistical reasoning was conducted with a group of students that attended an introductory course in descriptive statistics as part of an honours degree in mathematics education at the University of the Witwatersrand. The researcher was the course lecturer. Transcripts of the discussions in four video recorded sessions at the start of the semester long course form the bulk of the data. The discussions in the first three sessions of the course were aimed at structuring the data-context, or grasping the system dynamics of the data-context, as is required at the start of a cycle of statistical investigation. The discussion in the fourth session was about the syntactical meaning of the mean algorithm. It provides guidelines for meaningful disobjectification of the well-known mean algorithm. This study provides insight into informal statistical reasoning that is currently described as idiosyncratic or verbal according to statistical reasoning models. Discourse analysis based on Sfard’s (2008) theory of Commognition was used to investigate and describe discursive patterns that constrain shifting from colloquial to informal statistical discourse. The main finding is that colloquial discourse that is aimed at decision making in a data-context is incommensurable with statistical discourse, since comparison of data in the two discourses are drawn on incommensurable scales – a qualitative evaluation scale and a quantitative descriptive scale. The problem of comparison on a qualitative scale also emerged in the discourse on the syntactical meaning of the mean algorithm, where average as a qualitative judgement conflicted with the mean as a quantitative measurement. Implications for teaching and teacher education are that the development of statistical discourse may be dependent on alienation from data-contexts and the abstraction of measurements as abstract numerical units. Word uses that confound measurements as properties of objects and measurements as abstract units are discussed. Attention to word use is vital in order to discern evaluation narratives as deed routines from exploration narratives and routines.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits Business School, 2016 / Financial Inclusion seeks to overcome the friction that hinders markets from expanding access and use of formal financial products and services to a broad number of people. Despite the significant policy efforts and increased presence of formal financial service providers, the Ugandan economy still bears low levels of financial inclusion, especially in the rural areas. The finance growth and decision-behaviour theories substantiate the importance of understanding the psychological processes underlying observed individual judgments or choices regarding the use of formal financial services. Using Sen’s capability approach, this study examined the personal and societal capabilities that influence financial inclusion of individual financial consumers. Specifically, this study assessed whether the capabilities an individual possessed actually contributed towards their likelihood of financial inclusion. The hypothesized study relationships with financial inclusion were realized, following a positivist and quantitative approach using a cross sectional research design. The sample of 400 individuals to whom the survey questionnaire was delivered were drawn from two distinct regions of Central and Northern Uganda. The two regions represented varying levels of financial inclusion - high inclusion (urban Central) and low inclusion (rural Northern). In this study, besides the traditional regression models, structural equation modelling using Analysis of Moments (AMOS), were used to establish the causal relationships between the hypothesized study variables. The study results revealed that financial self-efficacy, financial literacy, social networks and the interaction of the personal and societal capabilities significantly contributed to an individual’s financial inclusion across the two regions. The results further revealed that the personal and societal capabilities independently, and when combined, contribute towards an individual’s financial self-efficacy. Through an assessment of the mediation effect, this study demonstrated how financial self-efficacy can boost individuals to confidently undertake financial tasks and decisions and consequently, financial inclusion in relation to their capabilities, respectively. The results provide support to Sen’s capability theory as a tool for explaining financial inclusion from a demand side perspective within the Ugandan context. / GR2018

Student Number : 8910202A - MPH research report - School of Public Health - Faculty of Health Sciences / An increasing number of people are migrating to South African urban centers (GJMC, 2000). There are various reasons that can be attributed to this migration; including the hope of finding employment and better living conditions. Recent urban migrants find themselves faced with the basic problem of lack of shelter and, depending on the migrant’s situation, they may choose to live in indoor shacks within the city center, backyard shacks in the black townships or join the growing number of informal settlement dwellers (GJMC, 2000). The number of informal settlements continues to grow at an alarming rate in Johannesburg (CEROI, 2000). This poses unique health care challenges as well as presenting the health care system with unusual disease conditions associated with general lack of infrastructure and services (CEROI, 2000). It has been established that the proportion of HIV infected patients is higher in people living in informal settlements when compared to people living in private houses (SAHR, 2000). Thus, it is expected that more people will be presenting with HIV and AIDS related illnesses in an informal settlement health center as compared to well-developed residential areas. This study aimed at exploring the prescribing patterns of health care givers for patients attending a health center in an informal settlement as well as to determine the major disease patterns prevalent in the area. The study was carried out in Davidsonville and OR Tambo clinics as well as Bophelong and Hikhensile clinics in Ivory Park. The study covered regions five, one and two respectively according to Gauteng metropolitan services area classification (GJMC, 2000). The findings of the study will help the appropriate policy makers improve the Essential Drug List and inform public health officials in formulating strategies that may lead to health status improvement for people living in informal settlements.