The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example in Greece, where spending on public health has been...
Glenn Ashton -
It is difficult to be positive about our educational system, supported by a government department that consumes more than a fifth of our total budget. Despite this we languish at the bottom of the international league in maths and science. School facilities are dismal. The educational system in several provinces is in tatters. Additionally, the Minister of Lower Education, Angie Motshekga, is regularly at odds with the dominant teachers union, the South African Democratic Teachers Union...
Irin Carmon -
Angelina Jolie's op-ed about her approach to mitigating breast cancer risk helped a company's stock value rise 4%. Is that what medicine is really about?
Times today has focused on her decision to undergo a double mastectomy after learning she carried the BRCA1 gene. As Salon noted here, that’s not the only option. But for those who do want to consider following Jolie’s path, there are structural barriers to even gaining the information to make those choices, something she...
Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson, challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
In this funny, stirring TED Talk, he outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. Robinson tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest...
John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt.
A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...
Saliem Fakir -
Living with an electricity monopoly armed with a mandate to provide basic services can be a double-edged sword. If well run and efficient it can be a boon for consumers and the public in general. If poorly and inefficiently run, the aftershocks will hurt your pocket and eat at the tax base for a long time to come.
When a utility company holds a monopoly over power plants, the transmission of electricity and large parts of the distribution network, as South Africa's Eskom does, it pretty...
