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There is an urgent need to equip community-based careworkers with the skills to address the mental health needs of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) as an essential response to shortages in human resources for mental health in Sub-Saharan Africa. We conducted a quasi-experimental feasibility trial in South Africa to adapt and evaluate an established year-long semi-structured, manualized video-feedback caregiver intervention (the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers; MISC) for community-based organizations (CBOs).Following a year-long iterative cross-cultural adaptation of MISC, we recruited 88 OVC (ages 7-11; 45.5% girls) and their CBO careworkers (MISC-CBO was acceptable and feasible in terms of attendance and post-intervention interviews. MISC improved child mental health, as well as the quality of careworker caregiving in terms of interactive effects for affective and cognitive (Expanding) components of MISC, and main effects for the cognitive components of Rewarding and Provision of meaning. MISC components did not mediate the effects of the intervention.The current study shows that laypersons with no tertiary education and virtually no prior training who undergo MISC training can improve caregiving quality and the mental health of OVCs.

There are over three million orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) currently living in South Africa. OVC are at high risk for a number of negative outcomes, including poor mental health. Hope has been associated with well-being among youth, including youth in South Africa. However, the relationships between hope and mental health in high-adversity populations such as OVC has not been adequately described. The present study sought to address this research gap by evaluating the relationship between hope and mental health, controlling for gender, age, and orphan status, among OVC. This study includes 8- to 12-year-old OVC (N = 61) in Manguang, Free State, South Africa. Hope was assessed using the Children’s Hope Scale (CHS) and mental health outcomes were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Hope was significantly, inversely associated with mental health outcomes after controlling for other variables in linear regression analysis. In contrast to previous research, this study found that increased hope scores were associated with adverse mental health outcomes among OVC in South Africa. Hope may be contextualized differently in this population due to resource scarcity and high rates of adversity including HIV-AIDS related stigma and poverty.

Male circumcision is considered by some to be an acceptable global approach to reduce HIV infections. Consequently, many governments in sub-Saharan Africa run voluntary male circumcision programmes. South Africa also provides male circumcision for free at state clinics and hospitals. Very little is known about the men who use this service. This study uses data from Cape Town, a sample of 1194 in 2016, and from Mangaung, a sample of 277 in 2017 and 2018, to fill this gap. The study finds that age targeting is inadequate, risk targeting is absent, and religious and cultural factors have a negative effect on the cost-efficiency of the service in the long run.

Informal settlements and mining development often go hand-in-hand in South Africa. This co-relationship results from policies to dismantle hostels and mining villages by shifting the responsibility from the mining companies to individual households and local governments. Attempts to address historical problems have created their own problems. This chapter looks at informal settlements in Emalahleni against a background of structural constraints caused by the dominance of capital and misguided government policies. We use concepts from complexity theory to understand the development and value of informal settlements in a mining settlement. We ask how informality links to mining and how people use informality to deal with mining risks. In addition, we ask what the contributing reasons for developing informal settlements in mining towns are.

This framework chapter addresses the consequences of shifting social responsibilities, new inequalities and the sustainability concerns created by this neoliberal phase and asks what will happen in the likely case of mining decline and closure in Emalahleni. The chapter foremostly focuses on describing the local realities in a growing coal and energy town of South Africa, Emalahleni. Considering the current reality, the chapter asks whether a just transition from coal-generated energy is possible and what the local implications will be of this global restructuring of the energy sector. A thorough investigation of a big topic like this, with all the ramifications that a just transition involves, could not be contained within one book if the authors attempted to cover several mining towns and cities. Emalahleni was selected because it is a microcosm of the global struggle for a just transition for all, in the face of the demand to switch from coal-fired energy. Books that use a case study of a single town or city to illuminate broad issues are not uncommon. Coal mining in South Africa, mining towns and neoliberalism in the mining industry are addressed. The methods and eight main research questions which the book answers were unpacked.

Asset-building policies are used worldwide to reduce state welfare commitments. In the Global South, including South Africa, asset-based housing development is thought to help reduce poverty. This study investigated asset building and homeownership in a sample of South Africa’s emerging black middle class. Interviews with 244 black middle-class households in Mangaung revealed asset value creation and heavy dependence on mortgage finance. Levels of mortgage default were low, although households with recently secured mortgages struggled to pay them off. We found little evidence that property-owning is helping these households to move out of poverty. Their ability to afford mortgage loans appeared to be directly related to their own efforts and human capital. Very few had considered downsizing as an option, possibly because ownership of a house has social value, for passing on to the next generation. Asset building was still in its early stages and, because these households had been denied equal opportunities and barred from homeownership by the apartheid regime, very few intergenerational transfers had yet occurred.

Purpose This study used cultural consensus modeling to elucidate culturally relevant factors associated with dual protection use (strategies to prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection [STI]/HIV) among South African adolescent girls aged 14–17 years. Methods In Phase 1, participants (N = 50) completed a free-listing survey assessing pregnancy and STI/HIV methods used by peers. In Phase 2, participants (N = 100) completed a rating survey to examine perceived peer acceptability of Phase 1 pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention methods. In Phase 3, qualitative individual interviews (N = 25) gathered in-depth information regarding the cultural acceptability of pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention strategies. In Phase 4, participants (N = 300) completed the Phase 2 rating survey for individual beliefs regarding the acceptability of pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention methods. Results In Phase 1, 41 pregnancy and 29 STI/HIV prevention strategies, along with 16 factors influencing pregnancy prevention method acceptability were endorsed; male condoms were the most commonly endorsed pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention method. In Phase 2, using cultural consensus analysis, participants were consistent in the perceived acceptability of pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention methods (73.4% variance accounted for in single cultural model). In Phase 3, qualitative findings provided in-depth information regarding factors influencing commonly used pregnancy (e.g., injectable contraception) and STI/HIV (e.g., condoms) prevention methods. In Phase 4, a single cultural model was identified (56.3% variance accounted for), with similar acceptability ratings as Phase 2. Conclusions A singular cultural model of pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention method acceptability was observed, with little awareness of dual protection. The findings highlight cultural factors for future culturally tailored dual protection interventions for South African adolescent girls.

Research on informal settlement upgrading tends to focus on one-off case studies. This article investigates the changing experiences, over nearly 25 years, of people living in an upgraded i...

BACKGROUND. Cultural consensus modelling (CCM) is an approach whereby individuals define the boundaries regarding a set of knowledge or behaviours shared by a group within a culture using an ethnographic approach. OBJECTIVES. To provide an overview of CCM methods and the application of CCM to examine South African adolescent girls' contraceptive and HIV prevention practices. METHODS. In phase 1 of a CCM approach, individuals respond to questions about their culture rather than their individual behaviours, allowing individuals to draw upon a shared cultural knowledge. Utilising these identified group beliefs, phase 2 asks individuals to rate the extent to which factors identified in phase 1 are valued. Phase 3 utilises qualitative interviews with key informants from phase 2 to gather in-depth information regarding the identified determinants of the health behaviour. Lastly, phase 4 of this approach conducts a quantitative survey to determine the extent to which cultural consensus model types are associated with differences in actual behaviours. RESULTS. CCM data analytic approaches are described. Frequencies and descriptive statistics for the free listing are conducted. For phase 2, cultural consensus analysis is conducted to examine whether one or several consensus models exist and competence scores are calculated. Standard qualitative analysis approaches are utilised for phase 3. Phase 4 employs regression to examine the association between cultural models and an outcome of interest. CONCLUSION. CCM provides a novel, culturally sensitive understanding of reproductive health practices among South African adolescent girls; CCM also has broad applicability to other adolescent health research domains.

The term ‘studentification’ is used to describe the socio-spatial implications of students occupying housing in the suburbs near the universities. Our paper looks at how studentification is managed in South Africa, where rising student numbers have caused conflict with other residents. We show that despite a history of segregation and low densities in South African cities, policymakers seldom consider the role that studentification plays in desegregation and in creating higher densities but focus instead on its negative impacts and how to regulate it. Hidden interests and a rigid planning framework focusing on control are underlying to this response. On the one hand, the planners need to take the concerns from existing landowners seriously. On the other hand, planners’ embeddedness in the history of planning as a tool to control as opposed to a more facilitating role is central to an understanding of the situation. We use evolutionary governance theory to show that this focus is mostly the result of path dependencies, goal dependencies and conflicts associated with interdependencies. The focus on norms and standards largely ignores the fact that about 70% of the students at the University of the Free State, the site of our case study, live in unregulated accommodation. We recommend that policymakers should consider alternatives such as pro-active upzoning and using rates and taxes as a way to bring about change.

The authors argue that, given (i) the unpredictability of the mining lifecycle and (ii) global pressure to transition out of coal, researchers must take a more critical perspective on place attachment and its consequences. Research generally depicts place attachment in a positive light. The conventional understanding is that place attachment brings stability, creates assets and helps society to take on and complete long-term projects. We use evidence from case studies to question the appropriateness of this conventional wisdom and whether it should be applied blindly in the mining industry. A policy of encouraging place attachment will be counterproductive if living standards and access to quality service provision cannot be maintained. Unchecked, place attachments can create financial lock-ins that lead to long-term economic damage. The likelihood of eventual mine closure means that policies that aim to induce place attachment to encourage stability, long-range planning and asset development may not be appropriate for all mining communities. While we agree that some measure of place attachment should be encouraged through social policy throughout the mine's lifecycle, we do not agree that place attachment should be constructed as an outcome in its own right.

This paper investigates the relationship between housing as an asset and the accumulation of other assets. Using data from a longitudinal research project stretching over nearly 25 years, we have found that besides actual income, there have also been improvements in self-perceived wealth ranking, asset holding, housing size, infrastructure access and human capital. Not all households have however benefited or been found to be better off. We have found that those households who had settled in Freedom Square after 1994 were indeed better off than the earlier settlers. Asset building is a slow process, one driven by stability (accessing urban land and secure tenure), finding an address, accessing education and finding work or remaining employed (though not necessarily in this particular sequence). Contrary to what the Department of Human Settlements suggests, we have found little evidence that informal settlement dwellers build assets by means of the secondary housing market.

The creation of mine settlements became a common practice between 1950 and 1980. These mining towns were seen as places of permanent settlement. This permanency, together with the privatisation of mine-owned houses (mid-1980s) increased place attachment. Mine decline thus brought with it some form of social disruption. Whereas mining companies in Australia have attempted to minimise the social disruption caused by mine closure by introducing fly-in-fly-out arrangements, the post-apartheid housing policy in South Africa has focused on asset building in mining areas. We completed 180 interviews with representatives of households. The survey formed part of a panel survey and further included a control group and 15 qualitative interviews. Our results indicate that though members of the mining community have housing units that are larger than those of the control group, incomes are lower in the mining community, real income is in decline, smaller numbers of household members are contributing to income, self-assessments of wealth are characterised by lower ratings, household assets increase at a slower pace, and there is a stronger preference to continue to reside in the area. All of the above serves to illustrate the consequences of the asset-based strategies embedded in South African housing policy. The social disruption associated with mine closure further tends to lock households into locations, and thus inhibits mobility.

Mining has globally been a key catalyst in economic development. That said, as mines inevitably move from boom to bust, there are significant local consequences for the mining towns and their populations when downscaling occurs. Gold mining has played an important historical role in the development of South Africa. Two secondary cities that have been particularly affected are Matjhabeng (Free State province) and Matlosana (North-West Province). This paper, in that it is based on primary document analysis (basic data and qualitative interviews) and on secondary research, investigates the nature of mine downscaling, the resultant policy and economic responses to the downscaling and the associated economic restructuring that is currently occurring in two secondary cities in South Africa. It is the result of a mismatch between government support and what is really required at the local level, and moreover that the approach to social licensing in South Africa through social and labour plans does not assist in the creation of either collaborative planning. Mining has created some local benefits (refuting the theories of the resource curse and the Dutch disease) and that the two secondary cities are managing to buffer mine downscaling by means of performing regional service functions.

Under apartheid, black African households could not own land or homes in most major urban centres in South Africa. This limited residential mobility and locked many households into state rental accommodation in townships. Homeownership for all South Africans was restored in the mid-1980 s and the Group Areas Act was repealed in 1991.Democracy opened up economic opportunities previously unavailable to black people. This paper investigates the effect on black middle-class South African households’ residential mobility and housing careers. A retrospective cross-sectional survey of 244 such homeowners in the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality determined their last five housing states. Changes in housing state indicated a steady improvement in housing quality, but tenure changes were not necessarily unidirectional—some had reverted to rental. More than 85% of the study participants had used mortgages to finance their housing career. Very few had financed their housing using own savings, an inheritance, or sale of a previous house, and not many had used the government subsidy. We found that housing careers are bridging the historical spatial racial divide in this municipality.

This paper examines Mangaung’s economic development initiatives against the background of the latest literature on secondary cities, with a specific emphasis on the 20-year period that has elapsed since the dawn of the postapartheid era. Although some of the plans aim to reverse apartheid planning it is argued that these plans are being hampered by the fact that they tend to focus on a local “buzz” option, and run counter to historical pathways for the city. Moreover, they do not take the value of an increasing knowledge economy into account, and they fail to contextualise the city’s development and future prospects in terms of its regional role. The paper identifies a number of pathways that build on history and include options for ensuring active participation in an increasing knowledge economy. Our contention is that the regional role of the city remains one of the key assets with a view to building future economic development pathways. Finally, a number of research themes are identified.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of mining towns, the various theoretical frameworks employed in studying mining settlements, the history and economic development of Postmasburg and the research methods used in this book. More specifically, attention is devoted to staples theory, social disruption theory, Dutch disease, the resource curse and the role of neoliberalism in the mining context. These theoretical constructs lay the basis for discussing both the development of Postmasburg and the research methods employed in this study. We conducted three quantitative surveys: a household survey, a well-being survey and a business survey. In the household survey, we collected 1 029 completed questionnaires from households in all areas of Postmasburg: 529 from households with members employed in mining, 273 from non-mining households and 227 from the informal settlements surrounding the town.

This paper investigates the relationship between socio-economic status and emotional well-being of orphans in Mangaung, South Africa. Five hundred orphans aged 7-11 years participated in the cross-sectional study between 2009 and 2012. Data was collected by trained fieldworkers, who conducted face-to-face interviews and questionnaires with the orphans, their teachers and caregivers, and the heads of the households where the orphans resided. The caregivers, children and teachers all completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in order to measure the orphans' mental health, while heads of household provided information about socio-economic indicators. STATA version 12 was used to perform multivariate data analyses to identify socio-economic factors associated with the mental health of orphans. Food security, access to medical services and a male caregiver were factors associated with better emotional well-being of orphans, whereas other variables such as household asset index and monthly household expenditure were not linked with the orphans' mental health. Two of the three variables (food security and access to medical services) associated with better emotional well-being of orphans are also government interventions to assist orphans. Further research is needed to determine whether other government programs also impact the emotional well-being of orphans.

Due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic which has left 12 million children orphaned in Sub-Saharan Africa, children are at increased risk for mental health problems. Currently, no validity data exist for any screening measure of emotional-behavior disorders in pre-adolescent children in Sub-Saharan Africa. The aims of the current study were to evaluate the construct validity of the caregiver-, teacher-, and self-report versions of the one-page Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in 466 orphans in South Africa between the ages of 7 and 11 (M age = 9.23 years, SD = 1.33, 51.93 % female) and to provide, for the first time, clinical cut-offs for this population. Findings demonstrated support for the caregiver SDQ, but not the teacher and self-report versions. We provide clinical cut-offs, but caution their use before further research is conducted. There remains a critical need for further psychometric studies of the SDQ in the developing world.

Urban change has systematically been researched for more than a century. One of the key foci has been the Central Business Districts (CBDs) of cities. The past decades has seen an extensive literature develop on CBD decline focusing on why such decay sets in and which strategies, as well as policies, that might be deployed to stimulate the revitalisation of these areas. The debates are, however, in the main developed within the context of large cities, whilst the geographical focus tends to be on countries of the post-industrial north. In the South African context, a small, but nevertheless significant literature has developed chronicling both CBD decline and subsequent revitalisation strategies deployed to reverse such decline. Similar to the international experience, the focal point has been South Africa’s main metropolitan regions, whilst secondary cities have remained beyond the investigatory focus. The aim of this paper was to provide an outline of the prospects and obstacles that face CBD revitalisation in the secondary city of Bloemfontein. It is argued that whilst generic revitalisation programmes in cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg have seemingly stemmed further CBD decline, other strategies might be required in secondary cities such as Bloemfontein.

Literature from the developed world suggests that poor housing conditions and housing environments contribute to poor mental health outcomes, although research results are mixed. This study investigates the relationship between housing conditions and the socio-emotional health of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in South Africa. The results of the study are mainly inconclusive, although it is suggested that methodological considerations play a vital role in explaining the mixed results. However, a positive relationship was found between living in informal settlements and better socio-emotional health of the OVC. We speculate that the historical context of informal settlement formation in South Africa helps to explain this unexpected result.