South African case study: Jozini

The Jozini area is administered by the Jozini local municipality, one of the five local municipalities within Umkhanyakude District Municipality, located in the North of KwaZulu-Natal, bordering Swaziland and Mozambique. The dominant population (as defined in the census) is Black African (99.2%). This means that the node is predominantly rural, which is consistent with it being historically part of the apartheid-era bantustan, KwaZulu. Apartheid era forced removals led to over-population and strain on an already fragile environment. To deal with this congestion, the apartheid regime introduced the Betterment Act. Betterment projects were aimed at land re-organisation and the resettlement of people in the name of social, economic and environmental sustainability, but were resisted by the people as being imposed and lacking community voice. The apartheid regime sidelined former homelands from investment, leaving them with a massive infrastructure deficiency and poor capacity to generate economic livelihoods for the communities. The result is a general lack of roads, electricity, schools, hospitals and clinics, water and sanitation services, among other basic services. High levels of poverty have also contributed to the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the area. Jozini is located in an area demarcated as a Presidential poverty node, and this makes the area highly dependent on social grants leaving little capacity for income generation and employment creation.

These legacies combined have impacted in the post-apartheid era and the democratically elected government has found that rural communities remain sensitive to policies, plans and projects that do not involve public participation. Although there is evidence of commitment to and understanding of the urgent need for service delivery and poverty reduction on the part of government, serious concerns about lack of co-ordination poor planning and communication abound. Where resources have been made available, the implementation of development programmes has been done with little consultation with beneficiary society and as such lacked community support.

The Jozini are continues to record very high levels of illiteracy and few opportunities for education. The majority of young people are not only unemployed, but unemployable outside the rural agriculture sector. Consequently the agriculture sector is one in which there exists potential for growth. However youth have not been sufficiently lured into agriculture and rural life is seen as a dead end. Therefore, Jozini finds itself with the shortage of labour to drive productive agriculture and caught in the paradox of food shortages and nutrition on the one hand and under-utilised land and water resources on the other.The majority of the rural poor in Jozini are women. They suffer double oppression – from economic and socio-cultural perspectives. In the context of a patriarchal (both, traditional or modern capitalist system) women’s voices are usually suppressed. As such, the focus on agriculture and rural livelihoods (a women dominated sector) in Jozini also brings to the fore the issues of gender mainstreaming and the capacity of women to communicate in a gendered terrain. With a female-headed household average of 50.6, the district is lower than the national ISRDP average of 54.9 but higher than the KZN provincial overage of 45.5. This is high enough to be an important factor regarding vulnerability and thus in need of specific poverty alleviation interventions.

It is already common knowledge that in the subsistence sector, women constitute the majority of the producers. Notwithstanding, the formal marketing channels are mostly male dominated. and although many men in rural areas face similar challenges to women, we focus more on women because of the special circumstances in which women are exploited as producers and reproducers.
It is not coincidental that the majority of the interviews and discussions upon which this report is based were with women. The development of the agriculture sector’s capacity to produce food and extra income for the participants is therefore with no doubt at the heart of the improvement of the rural material conditions of women.