University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences / Department of Communication

This study researched a project to set up a national television service for Botswana to find out whether the service could be used for rural development generally, and in particular to assist the Ministry of Health to implement its health projects in the rural areas and including the fight against the AIDS disease. It reviews conceptions of development and also analyses various communication models that usefully inform the conceptualisation of a TV service that can contribute to development. The study was done by going through reports of feasibility studies on the project and through letters of official correspondence among officials of the Government of Botswana who debated the subject of whether or not the country should have a national TV service. The reports and correspondence were supplemented with interviews of key people involved in the implementation of the project, as well as interviews of officials of the Ministry of Health. The findings of the study are that the Botswana television service project started and ended on a footing that forgot about television, a medium that is dependent on professional and organisational capacity and purpose, and as a result the project did not take-off. A qualitative method was used as the study required in-depth interviews during which new issues kept on emerging and nothing could be pre-determined because the study took place as the project was being implemented. The study was completed in June 2000, at a point where the project should have been completed but it was discovered that the station could not go on air as a television service had not been conceptualised and there was no management structure in place and the Government of Botswana appealed to the British Government for the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation to come quickly to Botswana to rescue the project and put it on track, supposedly. The study has concluded that the Botswana television service project became stillborn because there was a lack of professional and intellectual capacity to conceptualise the service, and instead there had been too much concentration on the construction of the TV building and acquisition of equipment.

M. Ed. (Educational Management) / The purpose and object of this study was to evaluate the role of education and planning with regard to Third World development in general, and a few Third World development problems in particular, with special reference to Qwaqwa. Research has indicated that the national plans of developing countries reflect the importance attached to education. The belief in an almost automatic relationship between education and development resulted in large sums allocated to the formal educational systems, both in budgets and in investment programmes. Two decades from the early optimistic years the world faces a crisis of educational expectations. There is increasing criticism of existing policies and systems and new solutions are being sought. Educational planning has been severely criticised for failing to anticipate and give warning about such damaging trends as the escalating costs of educational provision, the inefficient functioning of school systems, the growing number of educated unemployed and the failure of schools to reduce inequalities in national societies. This study is mainly descriptive. Available literature and statistics were used to describe the educational problems in the Third World and to indicate the linkages between the educational problems and a few broader development problems. Ancillary to this general framework an evaluation was made of education and planning in Qwaqwa. The description and evaluation of the educational and planning problems in Qwaqwa was mainly based on information obtained from the Research Institute for Education Planning, University of the Orange Free State and statistics obtained through research in Qwaqwa. The same unsatisfactory results of development efforts experienced elsewhere in the Third World are also experienced in the less developed areas (national states) of Southern Africa. An analysis of data indicated that Qwaqwa is confronted with similar educational and planning problems as most other developing regions. The conclusion was reached that in the past educational planning was defined too narrowly. The important point, however, is that development is a multidimensional process. Experience has shown that education must be planned as an integrated whole and relevant to the needs of the developing countries...

M.Cur. / The objective of this research is to explore and describe how the wife of a husband who suffered job loss, experiences this situation. In a country like South-Africa, where the unemployment rate ( 41,8% according to the expanded definition ) is very high and there doesn’t seem to be a solution, the wife of a unemployed husband faces considerable stress and increasing demands on a physical and psychological level. The wife of a husband who has suffered job loss, experiences problems regarding all the dimensions of human being. Her life becomes a struggle for survival from day to day. All this can give rise to mental problems. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, contextual research study has been undertaken to describe how the wife experiences it when her husband lost his job and to describe guidelines for psychiatric nurse practitioners to support these women. All the participants were residents of Pretoria and Midrand and their husbands had suffered job loss during the past year. Data was gathered through one-on-one in-depth interviews and analysed according to Tesch’s method of open coding. A qualitative exploration of these interviews showed that these wives appear to experience severe reactions on their physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions. A majority of these wives took full emotional responsibility for the whole family and suppressed her own needs and emotions. It then happened that they were confronted by the question: why do I live? This is worsened by the fact that the husband’s functioning is usually inadequate because of this trauma. This situation may have a negative impact on the couple’s relationship and on the development of their children. Guidelines were developed to emphasize the characteristics that the psychiatric nurse practitioner needs to help these women find some meaning in life. Community-involvement, support-groups and marriage-counselling are part of the guidelines to facilitate these women’s mental health. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made in the hope that this study will be integrated into future research.

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Magister Artium - MA / This minithesis provides an ethnographic account of the life world of older people in the community of Belhar in the Cape Peninsula, which was historically categorised as a 'coloured' community during the implementation of the Group Areas Act. By content analysing newspaper articles published in the early 1980s and specifically during the implementation of the Group Areas Act I found that many of the residents reported that they lived in fear of their lives, in what was once known as a 'prestige suburb'. At the present time the community of Belhar is an intensely gang-infested area. From preliminary research done by myself at a senior citizen centre in Belhar, the high incidence of violence was a recurring theme throughout discussions with older people. In fact when I posed the question Why do you come to the centre five days a week? to a group of older people they answered without hesitation It is unsafe for an older person to be alone during the day. Answers like these to many of the questions that I posed would almost always be followed with Things were better then. It also was apparent that the older people in this community remember (or perhaps reconstruct) the past in the context of their present living situation. This became the leading theme in my study and is also the background against which I had formulated my research questions. However this study not only focused on the impact of the high incidence of violence on the community of older people but also essentially looked at elderly residents; everyday lived experiences in Belhar. The research sample consisted of twenty elderly residents and four key informants. The latter provided mainly infrastructural data on the community. Primary data was collected by using ethnographic techniques of inquiry which included participant observation and unstructured interviews. Results revealed that older people occupy a liminal space both in the community and in their households. I also found that the elderly stroke victim is twice silenced and marginalized due to the constraints brought on by their chronic illness and their status as an older person in the community. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / The study seeked to investigate an evaluation of the effects of poverty in Khayelitsha Site C. Poverty in this area has manifested in the conditions people live under and the social effects of such conditions in the life of Site C residents was assessed in terms of/or in relation to the following: levels of infant mortality; level of malnutrition; rate of school drop out due to lack of food and other resources; high level of alcohol abuse; lack of basic services and the shortage of toilets etc. / South Africa

Masters of Art / Since the abolition of apartheid, levels of political violence in South Africa have dropped dramatically. However, violent conflicts in the communities are at high levels and are of grave concern. This development is far from the expectations of South Africans in the fading days of apartheid. Democracy was embraced as a cure to the conflicts that plagued South African communities in the apartheid era. Yet events after twelve years of democracy have proved this optimism premature. The purpose of this study was to examine why conflicts are increasing instead of decreasing in the democratic era of South Africa. It also examined the effects of conflicts on youth and the community as a whole. / South Africa

Magister Legum - LLM / After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States of America, there has been a shift in the policies of many countries to combat terrorism. Terrorism has had a devastating effect on many citizens of the world. These include 'the enjoyment of the right to life, liberty and physical integrity of victims. In addition to these individual costs, terrorism can destabilise Governments, undermine civil society, jeopardise peace and security, and threaten social and economic development. All of these also had a real impact on the enjoyment of human rights. Therefore the fight to curb further terrorist attacks is paramount. States are charged with the responsibility of curbing terrorism by their citizens. But with responsibility comes obligations to the citizenry.2 States should therefore not engage in policies or actions that further deprive others of their enjoyment of human rights. This is well put by Hoffman when he says history shows that when societies trade human rights for security, most often they get neither. / South Africa