Children navigating rural poverty: Rural children's use of wild resources to counteract food insecurity in the Eastern Cape,South Africa

This paper analyzes the role of natural resources in the lives of rural children experiencing heightened vulnerability to poverty and the impact of HIV/AIDS, a subject that previously has been unexplored. The authors highlight wild-food use by rural children as a regular activity that supplements their domestic diets. Over the course of 18 months in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the authors used a broad quantitative and qualitative methodology to explore the food acquisition and consumption patterns for 850 children. They found that the quality of children's domestic diets was, on average, 60% lower than the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) guidelines. This occurred in a population where 62% of the children surveyed were supplementing their diets with wild foods; and 30% with over half their diet supplemented in this way. Significantly, dietary diversity increased by 13% when wild food supplementation occurred. Another result was the commercialization of wild foods (observed among 47% of the children), wherein significantly more vulnerable children sold these foods. Considering the heightened nutritional and energy needs of children, combined with the impact of poverty and HIV/AIDS on household food access, wild foods represent the last freely attainable food sources available to them.     

When the snowball fails to roll and the use of ‘horizontal’ networking in qualitative social research

Snowball sampling is frequently advocated and employed by qualitative social researchers. Under certain circumstances, however, it is prone to faltering and even failure. Drawing on two research projects where the snowball failed to roll, the paper identifies reasons for this stasis. It goes on to argue that there are alternative forms of networking that can be developed by the qualitative social researcher in lieu of snowballing. Specifically, when research momentum fails to build, rather than drilling down ‘vertically’ through social networks, we argue that the researcher can move ‘horizontally’ across social networks and cast the sampling and recruitment net wide and shallow rather than deep. This change in emphasis can, we argue, make the difference between a project failing and a project succeeding, and points to the importance of a variegated understanding of the social networks on which our social research depends.     

Universities as peculiar organizations

We integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic, embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sovereign, enjoying a substantial margin of jurisdiction over their own boundaries and internal affairs. These insights are harmonious with classic insights on the character of academic organization and offer concise dimensions for observing variation in higher education systems across space and time.     

The safety net function of NTFPs in different agro-ecological zones of South Africa

Various South African studies have shown that rural households use NTFPs as safety nets in times of misfortune. However being focussed on one or two sites, they do not show the prevalence of NTFP use as safety nets across multiple sites. In addition, they do not show the use of NTFPs as safety nets by rural households in different agro-ecological zones. The results of the study showed that about 79% of the total households interviewed experienced at least one shock of some magnitude in the previous 12 months. The most experienced shocks were illness, death, crop failure, and hunger. The households employed various coping strategies in response to different types of shocks, with the three widely used strategies being assistance from friends and relatives, using cash savings, and using NTFPs. Households in low agro-ecological zones used NTFPs as safety nets more than households in high agro-ecological zones.