Enchanting the worn-out: the craft of selling second-hand things at Milnerton Market,Cape Town

This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe the labour of traders in making these worn-out objects into saleable products, detailing the displays and discussions which are integral to their valorisation. We show that Milnerton becomes imagined by traders and customers as an alternative to routine shopping at malls and boutique stores. The critical work of protecting and maintaining this alternative form of sociality is enabled by the policing of what can be sold of the market. This work of demarcation is intimately bound to racialised notions of value. In our conclusion, we bring international research on flea markets together with recent South African writings on consumption to consider how alternative trade may assert racial identity in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Rural brewing,exclusion, and development policy-making

This article highlights the economic role of women in the brewing industry in rural and periurban areas of sub-Saharan African countries. Local beer drinking is a form of social exchange and a reward for time-intensive work. Modern beer brewing in rural areas is a family operation. Beer is produced for subsistence and for sale. Locally brewed beer has a lower alcohol content than commercial brews. The author refers to Pradervand's (1990) study of local brewing in five east and west African countries. Pradervand found that men spent an estimated CFAF 18 billion per year on local brews compared to the value of total national exports of CFAF 21 billion per year in 1996. The male Kitui in rural Kenya were found to spend 60% of their weekly income on beer. Women dominate brewing in eastern and southern Africa. Rural beers are grain based (maize, millet, or sorghum), but may also be made from bananas, bamboo, sugar cane, or coconut. An estimated 25% of women in a village survey in Tanzania reported that beer was brewed one to four times a month. Another survey in the 1980s found that 73% of women brewed beer at some time. Beer brewing is a very significant economic activity for rural women. It provides higher levels of income and employment. Urban brewing by women has a negative image that rural women's beer brewing does not have. Grain for brewing comes from family farms or markets. Women's clubs are used as income generation groups for loans and as support groups. Women's beer brewing is not supported by development interventions or recognized by UN agencies. There are resource implications due to an estimated 5%-30% of annual wood consumption used for beer brewing. If women's role in beer brewing is ignored, male-dominated commercial interests will further marginalize rural women.     

The Impact of AIDS on Intergenerational Relationships in Africa

Abstract

This paper describes die impact of AIDS on intergenerational relationships in Africa (especially Sub-Saharan Africa). The AIDS infection in Sub-Saharan Africa has expanded astronomically with up to 18.5 million living with the disease. Young adults between the ages of 14 and 49 are most likely to be infected. In the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, three levels of HIV/AIDS infection among adults can be identified-hardest hit, high, and moderate. This ranges from 3.6% for moderate level to 35.8% for the hardest hit. The situation has changed the youth population profile and has numerous quality of life implications for young people, older adults, and a multi-dimensional impact on community life.

With the adverse socioeconomic and psychological effect of AIDS, interactions between members of the different generations are made difficult-relationships are becoming more of a burden than a mutual source of satisfaction. Children and young adults are losing their parents and mentors, and sometimes have to take care of their infected and dying parents at a very early stage in life. The older population is now losing its social and economic support, which hitherto, they have drawn from their adult children, and at the same time, they are assuming a new caregiving role to either their infected and affected children or grandchildren, or both.

Hope exists if the trend is checked by AIDS prevention efforts with examples drawn from countries like Uganda, Senegal, and Nigeria. But since there are some victims already, efforts should be made to help them cope with the stress and adverse effects of the disease. Governmental policies should also aim at assisting victims and volunteers financially. As part of the strategy, intergenerational relationships at family, organizational and community levels should be strengthened. Reinforcing the value of being one's “brother's keeper” both as individuals and groups/organizations is crucial at this time of crisis.     

Social Consequences of Employee/Management Buyouts: Two Canadian Examples From the Forest Sector*

Abstract Local control of natural resource processing facilities in small rural communities is often viewed as beneficial to community development. This paper employs social impact assessment tools to examine the social and economic effects of change in the ownership of forest products mills in two communities. Our analysis documents (1) the degree to which local ownership of the new, locally owned corporations led to local reinvestment of profits, and (2) whether the goals of the architects of these buyouts were realized: the maintenance of jobs, income, population, and a way of life. Overall, both communities were able to maintain jobs, population, and real estate values, and profits were reinvested in mill upgrades. After the buyouts, however, both communities experienced a rise and then a decline in community cohesion, and changes in local social and power relations, in which local ownership was short‐lived; benefits to relationships within the community were mixed.     

The Downside of Cyberspace

This article explores the actual and potential misuses of the World Wide Web in regard to access to “paper mills” and other information sources that make plagiarism relatively easy. The authors describe their experience accessing such paper mill products and present results of a quasi-experiment in which participants graded three papers: one an actual student submission and two purchased off the Internet. Findings suggest reason for concern about student misuse of the World Wide Web. The authors argue that different strategies for the design of class assignments must be considered by all educational programs to diminish enhanced opportunities for “cybercheating.”     

Wake up and smell the maillard reaction

The chemical reactions that occur when foods are browned during processing at high temperature also occur in the body during the natural aging process. Such reactions proceed at an accelerated rate in certain pathologies, such as diabetes, renal disease, atherosclerosis, and neurodegenerative diseases. A study now reveals that the consumption of foods rich in browned and oxidized products (so-called glycotoxins) induces a chronic inflammatory state in diabetic individuals. The study reveals a novel aspect at the interface between nutrition and disease, which might be especially relevant for the elderly and those with impaired renal function.     

Does Health Insurance Premium Exemption Policy for Older People Increase Access to Health Care? Evidence from Ghana

Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa causes major challenges for policy makers in social protection. Our study focuses on Ghana, one of the few Sub-Saharan African countries that passed a National Policy on Aging in 2010. Ghana is also one of the first Sub-Saharan African countries that launched a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS; NHIS Act 650, 2003) with the aim to improve access to quality health care for all citizens, and as such can be considered as a means of poverty reduction. Our study assesses whether premium exemption policy under the NHIS that grants non-payments of annual health insurance premiums for older people increases access to health care. We assessed differences in enrollment coverage among four different age groups (18–49, 50–59, 60–69, and 70+). We found higher enrollment for the 70+ and 60–69 age groups. The likelihood of enrollment was 2.7 and 1.7 times higher for the 70+ and 60–69 age groups, respectively. Our results suggest the NHIS exemption policy increases insurance coverage of the aged and their utilization of health care services.     

Analysing the Gendered Insecurities of Migration

This article examines the experiences of female migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa aiming to reach Europe via Morocco. The article argues that European immigration policies and policies of co-operation with neighbouring countries on the other side of the Mediterranean, have increased the sources of insecurity for migrants attempting to reach Europe, and shows how these insecurities are gendered.     

Does the sense of the geographic proximity of a requester influence donation? Three evaluations in field studies

It has been reported that familiarity or incidental similarities with a stranger influenced an individual’s behavior. However, the effect of the sense of geographical proximity believing that someone comes from the same area that somebody has never been examined. Three field experiments examined this effect on donations to humanitarian organizations. In the first study, participants were asked by a confederate to donate food products to a humanitarian organization. In Study 2, participants were asked by confederates to donate money for children. In Study 3, donation boxes were displayed in bakeries with a message that invited customers to donate money for children. In all the studies, participants were led to believe that they would be helping people in need or people who live in their national or local geographic area. Results showed that donations were higher in the geographical proximity condition. This “neighborhood effect” was discussed.     

Introduction

Empirical studies of occupational structure in South Africa have tended to be unsatisfactory, detailed work on small sectors of the economy coexisting with across‐the‐board studies too crudely aggregated to allow for a precise assessment of a changing situation. This study presents the results of an analysis by ‘race’ into 14 occupational groups of South African employment outside agriculture, domestic service and the informal sector over the period 1969 to 1977. It argues that over the period there has been a definite increase in the share of owner I manager and, more particularly, petty bourgeois occupations, with a corresponding decline in the proportion of unskilled workers. It also suggests that changes in the ‘racial’ division of labour are more complex than has sometimes been supposed.     

Urgency and engagement: Empirical evidence from a large-scale intervention on energy use awareness

We study how to foster engagement in the energy sector, where signals about consumption are opaque and infrequent. We evaluate an energy company's large-scale communication campaign for promoting natural gas self-reading. Self-readings allow utilities to bill customers on the basis of real - as opposed to estimated - consumption. Exploiting variation in campaign messages, we test the impact of imposing a sense of urgency on customers through a deadline for submitting a meter reading. We find that messages that induce a sense of urgency are twice as effective than generic messages in encouraging self-readings, consistent with recent research on the urgency effect. The increased sense of urgency moves to action customers with both high and low levels of baseline engagement; the effect is stronger on the former.     

A review of enabling factors in support intervention programmes for early school leavers: What are the implications for Sub-Saharan Africa?

One of the major problems facing education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa is the phenomenon of young people who leave school before completion. Research has shown that this phenomenon disadvantages young people and exposes them to various forms of social exclusion. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for the scaling up of support intervention programmes for young people who leave school early. This paper analyses literature on support intervention programmes for early school leavers (ESLs) to identify enabling factors that can be promoted in future or in current less effective interventions. The review revealed that programmes that address the multiple disadvantages and needs of young people through flexible, holistic and intensive support approaches tend to be more attractive and beneficial to the participants. The findings from this review are crucial to policy makers and teachers working in support intervention programmes for ESLs.     

Evaluating the impact of utility company billing plans on residential energy consumption

Many utility companies offer their customers the choice of participation in an average payment plan, which enables them to pay a fixed sum for their utility bill each month (with final settlement at the end of the billing year), instead of the conventional “pay as you go” billing procedure. Because customers on average payment plans are protected from paying large bills during peak energy-use seasons and because the information about monthly energy use and its cost is perhaps less salient to them, it was hypothesized that customers on the average payment plan would use more electricity than customers not on the plan. Using a nonequivalent control group design, the electricity consumption of a selection of customers of two utility companies (Ns = 475 and 74) was examined. The results showed that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis. Since the logic of hypothesis testing does not permit the ready acceptance of the null hypothesis, several procedural, methodological, and statistical points were made to buttress the conclusion that the average payment plans had no effect on electricity consumption.     

The impact of AIDS on income and human capital

This paper studies the impact of HIV/AIDS on per capita income and education. It explores two channels on how HIV/AIDS affects income that have not been sufficiently stressed by previous literature: the reduction of the incentives to stay in school due to shorter expected longevity and the reduction in productivity of experienced workers. In the model, individuals live for three periods, may get infected in the second period, and with some probability die of AIDS before reaching the third period of their lives. Parents care for the welfare of the future generations so that they will maximize lifetime utility of their dynasty. The simulations predict that the most affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in the future will be, on average, 30% poorer than they would be without AIDS. Schooling will decline in some cases by 40%. These figures are dramatically reduced with widespread medical treatment, as it increases the survival probability and productivity of infected individuals.     

Family planning: a human right for women

Cultural factors determining the low rate of contraceptive practice in Sub-Saharan Africa are examined, using data concerning 164 women in Cross-River State, Nigeria. Results indicate that cultural mores prevent these women from exercising their rights to education, employment, and community participation and keep them from an awareness of family planning options. The author suggests that this is accomplished in part by placing the entire burden of child rearing upon the mother. (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Urban cultivation in Accra: an examination of the nature, practices, problems, potentials and urban planning implications

The literature on urban farming in Sub-Saharan African cities reveals that most studies have been conducted in Eastern, Southern and Central African cities. A few have focused on West Africa, including Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, and Cameroon. In Ghana there is a paucity of information on urban farming. The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of urban cultivation in Accra, Ghana's capital, reviewing existing research, and to present new empirical findings on urban cultivation emphasizing on its history, nature, practices, problems, potentials and urban planning implications.     

Goal Orientation and Performance of Family Businesses

Family businesses consist of family members pooling their resources together to achieve a particular goal for the family business. The objectives of this study were to profile the characteristics of the family businesses and business owners by owners’ goal orientation and to examine the influence of goal orientation on family business performance. The mean differences in values of business size, business age, and business liabilities were statistically significant by owners’ goal orientation. The major findings of this study suggest that owner goal orientation had a statistically significant effect on business performance. Specifically, setting a business goal such as growth or a positive reputation with customers had a significant and positive impact on family business performance.     

Keynote 3. Living in the Valley of Death

Abstract

In 2003 alone, HIV/AIDS killed more than three million people, of which between 2.2 and 2.4 million were from Sub-Saharan Africa. This disease is having a devastating effect on the previously firm foundations of intergenerational relationships in affected countries. For many nations in Africa, Asia and South America, life has become a mirage, a paradox in which almost everything is overshadowed by the pangs of death. Poverty, HIV/AIDS and, surprisingly, compassion are the combined common causes of death. Consequently, social, ecological, economic, political and educational systems are almost entirely dislocated. Traditions demand that the young ones should outlive their elders. So there is a deliberate effort on the part of the elderly to embrace death in attempting to be compassionate. This paper is an attempt to explore this scenario with the aim of articulating the linkage between poverty and HIV/AIDS, and proposing ways of reducing their impact through intergenerational programming.     

Is Business Discourse Colonizing Philanthropy? A Critical Discourse Analysis of (PRODUCT) RED

Increasingly, traditional notions of philanthropy are colonized by a market discourse that promotes consumption as an effective way to solve social ills, resulting in what scholars have termed “marketized philanthropy.” This paper examines the implications of marketized philanthropy through a discourse analysis of the (PRODUCT) RED campaign benefiting the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in Africa through consumption of (RED)-branded products. This paper explores the implications of a business-oriented model of philanthropy for bringing about social change, the repercussions of campaigns like (RED) that explicitly shed the label of philanthropy; and how they impact political engagement.