Bøger udgivet af Institute for Democracy in South Africa

South Africa's gold mining workforce has the highest prevalence rates of tuberculosis and HIV infection of any industrial sector in the country. The contract migrant labour system, which has long outlived apartheid, is responsible for this unacceptable situation. The spread of HIV to rural communities in Southern Africa is not well understood. The accepted wisdom is that migrants leave for the mines, engage in high-risk behaviour, contract the virus and return to infect their rural partners. This model fails to deal with the phenomenon of rural-rural transmission and cases of HIV discordance (when the female migrant is infected and the male migrant not). Nor does it reveal whether all rural partners are equally at risk of infection. This study examines the vulnerability of rural partners in southern Mozambique and southern Swaziland, which are two major source areas for migrant miners. It presents the results of surveys with miners and partners in these two sending-areas and affords the opportunity to compare two different mine-sending areas. The two areas are not only geographically and culturally different, they have had contrasting experiences with the mine labour system over the last two decades. The spread of HIV in Southern Africa in the 1990s coincided with major downsizing and retrenchment in the gold mining industry which impacted differently on Mozambique and Swaziland. Swaziland has been in decline as a source of mine migrants while Mozambique remained a relatively stable source of mine migrants. The study therefore aims not only to shed light on vulnerability in mine sending areas, but also to draw out any contrasts that might exist between two mine-sending areas that were inserted into the mine migrant labour system in different ways during the expansion of the HIV epidemic.

When it comes to Climate Change the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do is vast. Developing a plan to get us from where we are to where we need to be is now one of the most important tasks of modern society. In this, South Africa was an early leader, and it approached the question in a remarkable way. The South African Long-Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) is an internationally celebrated example of how people can come together to work with the evidence to develop the questions of the day. What was remarkable was not only the scientific rigour adopted, but the way in which leaders worked together to reach a broad consensus. Their vision, and the response of the South African government, was groundbreaking and extraordinarily ambitious. The LTMS has quietly reshaped the South African landscape. This book is the story of the people and the process by which they took up the challenge and produced these Long-Term Mitigation Scenarios.

The relationship between migration, development and remittances in Lesotho has been exhaustively studied for the period up to 1990. This was an era when the vast majority of migrants from Lesotho were young men working on the South African gold mines and over 50 percent of households had a migrant mineworker. Since 1990, patterns of migration to South Africa have changed dramatically. The reconfiguration of migration between the two countries has had a marked impact on remittance flows to Lesotho. The central question addressed in this report is how the change in patterns of migration from and within Lesotho since 1990 has impacted on remittance flows and usage.