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Sustainable Livelihoods and the Eradication of Poverty
Rationale
The overall aim of this focus area is to investigate ways of reducing vulnerability, generating sustainable livelihoods and eradicate poverty in South African society. The experience of most South African households is one of outright poverty or of continuing vulnerability to being poor. For many of the households, there is a limited access to education, healthcare, nutritious food, reliable sources of income, shelter, energy and clean water. The poor, both urban and rural, often live in marginal and degraded environments. In recent years, the erosion of social institutions and networks has exacerbated problems related to poverty and vulnerability.
Poverty is multidimensional and complex. However, to optimise research capacity development through partnerships and networking, and to maximize the value of the research outputs for society, specific focus is necessary. This is achieved through the identification of six research themes.
These are:
- Environment and natural resources utilisation,
- Integrated food security, nutrition and health,
- Local development,
- Understanding the informal sector,
- Social institutions and networks, and
- Service provision and management.
Collaboration of researchers and research groups around these themes is expected to improve their local, regional and international standing and enhance their access to research resources. Each of the themes encourages multi-disciplinary, people- and problem-oriented approaches.
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Aims/Objectives
- Contribute to reducing vulnerability and eradication of poverty,
- Improve the understanding of the nature and process of sustainable urban and rural development
- Investigate and advise on micro- and macro-policies of sustainable urban and rural development
- Research different forms of interdependent between urban and rural settlements
- Research ways to measure the impact of micro and macro economic and social policies on people's livelihood strategies
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Themes 1: Environment and Natural Resources Utilisation
This research theme seeks ways of reconciling the pressing need for economic growth, sustainable livelihoods, poverty eradication, and the maintenance of the environment, which is threatened by processes, such as intensification of agriculture, mining, industrial pollution, physical overcrowding and overstocking.
- Conceptualization of land and land-use practice
- Youth perception of land and farming
- Access to natural resources
- Water supply and its physical and demographic threats
- Social forestry and its contribution to sustainable livelihoods
- Governance, community-based natural resources management
- Environmental hazards - drought, fires and floods
- Animal health and veterinary services
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Theme 2: Integrated Food Security, Nutrition and Health
This research theme seeks ways of making all South Africans well nourished and healthy through the improvement of household and intra-household food and nutritional security, preparation and storage of food, education and policy.
Selected research issues:
- Malnutrition ( covering both under- and over-nutrition )
- Household food and nutritional security
- Intra-household food inequalities
- Nutrition education
- Nutrition of vulnerable group
- Food production, processing, distribution and retailing
- Food consumption patterns and dynamics
- Fortification and food supplements
- Genetically-modified foods
- Nutrition policy
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Theme 3: Local Development
This research theme investigates relationships between various forms of organised society, including government, NGOs, CBOs, and business and labour organizations, and development at a local level. The broad concept of local development includes both economic and non-economic dimensions and corresponds with evolving definitions and interpretations of poverty.
Selected research issues:
- Theory of local development and its interpretation
- Experiences in local development
- Policy and local development
- Spatial development initiatives
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Theme 4: Understanding the Informal sector
This research them responds to the problem of persistently high rates of unemployment in South Africa, which indicate that the formal economy is unable to absorb the available labour. It investigates how people construct livelihoods in ways other than joining the formal economy in a range of contexts, both urban and rural.
Selected research issues:
- Quantifying the informal sector: size, shape, distribution and dynamics
- Contextualization of diversity of the informal sector
- Relationships between the informal sector and economic reconstruction, de-industrialisation, privatization, de-agrarianisation, and re-agrarianisation
- Success in the informal sector
- Policy and the informal sector
- The informal sector and business concepts, such as the marketing concept, competition and self-regulation
- Technology and the informal sector
- Small-scale farming
- Illegal and anti-social economic activity
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Theme 5: Social Institutions and Networks
This theme investigates the meaning of social capital in various South Africa contexts and its role in the reduction of vulnerability and the eradication of povery
Selected research issues
- Community based organisations and institutions
- Erosion of social capital and its effects
- Kinship and household food security
- Environmental pollution and social effects
- HIV/AIDS and social capital
- Building social capital: the role of organised society and development initiatives
- Social capital and property rights
- Crime and insecurity
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Theme 6: Service Provision and Management
To be considered for funding under this theme, poverty and livelihoods should be central to the research proposal.
Selected research issues
- Nature of poverty
- Gender and feminization of poverty
- Homelessness, housing and shelter
- Mortality, Guidance and counseling
- Energy
- Transportation
- Communications
- Water supply and sanitation
- Waste
- Recreation
- Tourism
- Fishing and aquaculture
Contact
Lebusa Monyooe
Manager: Focus Areas
email: lebusa@nrf.ac.za
Tel:+27 12 4814230
Fax:+27 12 4814005
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