Browsing by Subject "informal settlements"

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    Open Access
    Bridging the education gap: an exploratory study of education in low-income rural and informal settlements in Namibia
    (2025) Haingura, Pascalius; Hamann, Ralph
    This qualitative study explores educational challenges and opportunities in low-income communities in northern Namibia and informal settlements in central Namibia. Recognising education as a key driver of national development, the research identifies significant misalignments between the educational expectations of these communities and the priorities set by the Namibian government, highlighting systemic challenges that hinder inclusive education for marginalised populations. The study is framed using the Heneveld and Craig (1995) Framework as further highlighted, tailored for sub-Saharan Africa. This framework evaluates how national education policies translate into school practices, emphasizing the importance of socio-economic and cultural factors. The research employs an exploratory qualitative design, utilizing purposive and convenience sampling to capture the experiences of teachers, education officials, parents, and community members through interviews, focus groups, policy document reviews, and field observations. Findings reveal a disconnect between government policies and community expectations, with communities dissatisfied by top-down approaches to education reform. Socio-economic challenges, local traditions, and cultural factors shape community expectations but are often overlooked in policy design and implementation. Bureaucratic inefficiencies were also cited as barriers to effective policy execution, and resource gaps, particularly inadequate teacher training and underfunded school infrastructure, further aggravated these challenges. The study advocates for community-centric education models that incorporate local traditions and practical knowledge into curricula, fostering relevance and inclusivity. Strengthening collaboration among the Ministry of Education, schools, and communities is crucial for more effective education reforms. Additionally, the research highlights the need for capacity-building initiatives to enhance teachers' cultural competence and teaching skills. Contributing to the academic discourse on education in sub-Saharan Africa, this study emphasises the need for context-specific interventions that align educational policies with socio-economic realities, cultural identities, and community aspirations. Future research is encouraged to explore the role of local traditions, bureaucratic impacts, and private school models in improving education quality and equity.
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    Open Access
    Water and sociality in Khayelitsha: an ethnographic study
    (2022) Kongo, Minga Mbweck; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Chitonge, Horman
    This study examines forms of social relationships created around unequal municipal water distribution in South Africa. Using the case of Khayelitsha, the study investigates residents' use of water to sustain their livelihood and build personhood. Water mobilises the formation of relationships in myriad ways. How residents, collectively and individually, imagine, negotiate and construct their future pathways around resources available to them in a social group is explored. Ethnographic tools are used to address how social formations are created around municipal water in Khayelitsha. The study looks into how inequalities related to access to water in Cape Town are produced with inequitable development patterns. Using incompleteness and conviviality as framework, the study seeks to understand how ideas of social formation, belonging, marginality, and physical and social mobility are produced, reproduced and contested around water. By focusing on the strategies deployed by residents, this study also seeks to describe the challenges of inadequate water access experienced by residents in less- provisioned areas. The multiple relations with, and complexities of, municipal water are chronicled, as well as how Khayelitsha residents think about, relate and respond to water. The empirical data reveal several structural issues characterising the formation of social relations: incompleteness, impoverishment, marginalisation, water access and minimal opportunities. Despite many challenges, frustration, and heavy reliance on communal taps, tanks, water trucks, and hydrants, shack dwellers particularly cherish an ideal of self-sufficiency with the limited amount of water they access. In this quest, they maintain social relations and resistance to the political economy of water. They achieve this by mobility from one settlement to another, maintaining a strong sense of community, belonging, social relationships, and household interdependence, connected to a sense of incompleteness and, to a more considerable extent, Ubuntu. This social practice is manifested in various forms: neighbourliness, water usage at communal points, land occupations, and strikes, amongst others. By combining the structural issues and aspects of social practices provided above, water is seen as a substance that constructs social formations through the phenomena of incompleteness and conviviality. The data were collected during several field visits between February 2020 and March 2021 through observation of interactions and participation in residents' social activities and formal and informal interviews and group discussions with a representative sample of residents in Khayelitsha.