MUTUAL FEEDBACK SHOCKS BETWEEN ICT AND POVERTY IN SOUTH AFRICA

The National Development Plan (NDP) recognises access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as a hindrance towards economic advancement in South Africa and lists universal access to broadband services as an enabling milestone towards reducing poverty (National Planning Commission 2011: 149). In many respects South Africa has made tremendous progress with access to basic voice telephony, as a result of the rapid expansion of mobile service providers, mainly due to convenience and the introduction of pre-paid telephony. However, with respect to other elements of ICT, especially access to services that require broadband infrastructure, South Africa has not made much progress over the past decade. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relationship between access to ICT and poverty in South Africa in order to establish whether any meaningful correlations exist. The paper furthermore attempts to identify those areas in South Africa that are characterised by both high levels of poverty, and low levels of access to ICT. There is a strong negative correlation between the geographic spread of access to ICT and the geographic spread of poverty in South Africa. In other words, areas where poverty are relatively high are areas likely to experience relatively low access to ICT, conversely, areas where poverty are relatively low are likely to experience relatively high levels of access to ICT.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between poverty and carbon emissions in South Africa covering the period between 1994 and 2020. The study employed the ARDL bounds test to assess the existence of a long run relationship between the variables. The results evidenced existence of a long run relationship between poverty, carbon emissions, economic growth and renewable energy consumption in South Africa. The results are such that carbon emissions have a positive and a significant effect on poverty in the long run. Therefore, with CO2 emissions having a positive influence on poverty, causes more losses in the socioeconomic system and reduces the ability of the population to cope with poverty. Therefore, it is recommended that the government should promote the growth of the South African carbon market, increase enterprise involvement through acceptable price and quota allocation, and work in tandem with other environmental measures to promote sustainable development. This will help alleviate poverty in South Africa.

Digital development for a progressive networked society

Perception of Ultimate Utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as an Impetus in Enhancing Employee Performance in a Few Selected Municipalities in the Eastern Cape of South Africa

Assessing the Role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Enhancing Employees’ Performance in a Selected Local Government Administration (LGA) in South Africa

The Present as a Legacy of the Past: The Labour Market, Inequality and Poverty in South Africa

Human capital (HC) has increasingly been identified as a driver of economic development, with the potential to reduce income inequality, which, in South Africa, originates in the labour market. HC is, however, a complex concept to measure. This study uses Fields’ regression-based decomposition method to analyse the relationships between income inequality and HC in South Africa. The Fields method allows for the analysis of the impact of several factors contributing to HC on the distribution of a measure of income. Data from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) wave 1 (2008) and 5 (2017) are used. The findings suggest that increasing educational attainment, through improved school quality for all, would likely play a key role in reducing income inequality in South Africa. Furthermore, the large role of education attainment in explaining household income inequality supports the use of education attainment as a proxy for HC in South Africa.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can play a significant role in the socioeconomic development of many countries. Digitisation in South Africa has increased, and ICT skills are pivotal in the sustainability of youth employability in the labour market. Hence, ICT skills, soft, hard, and technical skills are required in government, private organisations, and businesses. This study aims to investigate possible ways educational systems can adopt ICT skills to improve youth employability in South Africa. This study examines the factors that affect youth employability such as lack of ICT skills, access, income, affordability, infrastructure, poverty gap, inequality, lack of education, lack of access to information, and high demand for IT skills expectations in organisations as among the challenges that hinder youth employability in the South African economy. We propose that educational institutions should incorporate practical pedagogy to prepare qualified youths for the labour market. This study focuses on using ICTs for the sustainable development of youth employability in South Africa. The Sustainable Livelihood Theory was used as the study framework while the quantitative method was used for the data collection process. The researchers used close-ended and open-ended questions to draft a questionnaire to gather data from 49 respondents. We triangulated the received data from youths living in the East Rand of Johannesburg. Results derived from the study show the significance of ICT skills in educational systems on youth employability. The practical implication of the study recommends that policymakers implement ICT skill strategies to support educational institutions to prepare youths for the labour market.

Building tax data for research: The South African experience

This paper unpacks the ways in which race and modernity shaped perceptions of crime, disorder, and poverty in South Africa by looking at how aspects of inequality and injustice were inscribed into discourses of disorder in the past. Historically, the issues of race and poverty in South Africa were often used in traditional urban settings to produce numerous images of urban crises. The paper is presented in four sections. The first section focuses on Michel Foucault's ideas on the nature of punishment in modern society and how correctional institutions regulate the lives of those deemed to be a “danger to modern society.” Foucault's ideas are set to provide an explanatory platform for the paper's overall analysis of penal practice in South Africa. The second section focuses on the interaction between the construction of mechanisms of racial hegemony in South Africa in the past and the development of a penal system that could harness and control the consequences of rapid social change. Punishment is here linked to four broad developments that emerged alongside the construction of a modernizing society. These developments included debates and processes that sought to respond to problems on indigency, links between punishment systems and understandings of racial mixing, the reliance on the authority of scientific interventions and programs of education to assess and address identified needs, and the belief in preparing subjects for work in order that they later not be a burden to the state. The third section addresses the ways in which the evolving punishment system in South Africa was both informed and constituted by academic criminological thought during the twentieth century. Dirk Van Zyl Smit has identified two criminological periods in the development of penal practice in South Africa after 1910, periods that he has characterized as “Legal Reformism” and “Afrikaner Nationalism.” He notes that the two periods and traditions interacted in complex ways to inform the development of social policy thereafter. For example, Van Zyl Smit notes that both traditions of criminological thinking assumed that the building of a new South African nation within the broader imperial framework would always only be based on “Afrikaners and English working together.” It was also assumed that indigent whites that committed crimes of serious social consequence did so only because there weren't enough social welfare programs in place to protect them from “falling into disrepute.” Using the key concepts prevalent in the first three sections, the fourth section briefly suggests how notions of color shaped and interacted with institutional provision and arrangements in the period 1945 to 1970.

Poverty and unemployment are considered social threats in South Africa as the rate keeps on escalating while few measures are implemented to alleviate the trend. This study devised a hybrid model to reduce the rate of poverty and unemployment in South Africa. The Human Capital Theory formed the theoretical base of this study, which explained the need for the government to invest in education to improve the chances of gaining employment to reduce poverty. The study adopted a quantitative approach and data were collected from only secondary sources. Major findings disclosed that the poverty rate in South Africa is at 49.2% while 64.2% of South African blacks remain poor. The study revealed that the unemployment rate is at 30.1% in the first quarter of 2020 while provinces such as Eastern Cape (40.5%) and the Free State (38.4%) have the highest share of unemployment in the country. The meta-analysis conducted revealed that improvement is needed in areas such as legislation and labour laws, entrepreneurial development, youth development policies, common vision and leadership, sectoral development, business climate, acquisition of skills and education, engagement management, and strategic management. This is in an endeavour to reduce poverty and unemployment rate in South Africa.

Study of the Incidence and Nature of Chronic Poverty and Development Policy in South Africa: An Overview

South Africa was privileged to be part of the MDGs agenda which was adopted in 2000. One of the aims of MDGs was to reduce extreme poverty by half in 2015. For that reason, South Africa integrated policies and strategies to rid poverty by half to that of United Nations (UN). Through all the combined policy approaches, South Africa has successfully achieved the target of halving the population living below PPP$1.25c per person per day. Whichever threshold used, the results showed that the percentage share of people living below poverty line has now decreased from 11.3 per cent in 2000 to 4.0 per cent in 2011. However, these reports are not reflecting the exact poor’s experiences because at household level there is still an outright poverty. Therefore, if the national poverty report gives a good picture about South African poverty status whereas there is still prevalence of poverty at household level, there are high chances that wrong policies in regard to poverty reduction strategies will be wrought. Hence this paper focuses on the determinants of household poverty in South Africa. The sole aim of this paper is to assess the determinants of household poverty in South Africa. The reviewed literature on determinants of poverty in South Africa would enable policy makers to see the effect of demographic characteristics on poverty in South Africa. Thus, strategies and policies aimed at alleviating poverty in South Africa can be directed to the discussed factors.

This paper examines the role of democracy on poverty and intergenerational inequality in South Africa. The authors used secondary data and published literature to unpack the nexus of the problem, and to further broaden understanding of democracy, intergenerational inequality, and poverty in South Africa. The authors establish that unemployment, lack of property ownership and a poor educational system are the main contributors to poverty and intergenerational inequality in South Africa. However, we found that the government’s propoor policies have not adequately addressed the problems. As recommendations, this paper submits that it is essential to increase the redistribution of assets, especially land, to allow land ownership by the poor, which will open many other economic opportunities, such as access to capital. Also, government policies need to be revisited for quality job creation, closing the unemployment gap in the market.

International and national data made available during the past few years indicate that access to and use of information and communication technology (ICT) and services is experiencing slow growth in South Africa. In the early 2000s, South Africa led Africa in terms of ICT infrastructure development. However, more recent ICT statistics indicate that other African countries, such as Nigeria and Mauritius are advancing faster than South Africa in this regard. The World Economic Forum Global Information and Communication Report (2012, in e-Skills Institute Newsletter, 2012a) states that the sub-Saharan African region still has the least developed ICT infrastructure in the world, and also has a severe lack of ICT skills. Having considered the Southern African ICT infrastructure deficiencies, this article captures and evaluates ICT policy and regulatory interventions instituted by South Africa towards the creation of a knowledge society. The article starts by providing brief historical background on ICT access and use in South Africa, and states the stakeholders engaged in transforming South Africa towards e-readiness. The Digital Access Index is applied as a measuring instrument or research method to measure the South African e-readiness status. Further, the article evaluates the progress of South Africa towards becoming an information society by comparing levels of public access to, and usage of ICT in South Africa with those of selected African countries and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n10p331