Mining

Pigg’s Peak is a developing town, located in the north West of Swaziland, approximately 70 kilometers north-east of the capital city of Mbabane. The town is also located 40km from […]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE URGENT MEDIA ALERT: JUDGEMENT IN HISTORIC SILICOSIS CLASS ACTION TO BE HANDED DOWN TOMORROW Sonke Gender Justice, Section 27 and Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) alert members of the […]

This issue covers African stock markets, with articles on good governance, corruption and instability in the markets as well investment funding and how farmers get their goods to market.

Kinshasa, 4 décembre: La persistance des pesanteurs socioculturelles liées Á  certaines coutumes et Á  des traditions rétrogrades demeure l’un des obstacles majeurs Á  l’intégration du genre dans les politiques et programmes de développement de beaucoup de pays de la région de la SADC, y compris en République Démocratique du Congo (RDC). Malgré quelques avancées observées

This journal includes articles on creating strong industries in Africa to tackle joblessness and poverty; adding value to raw materials; micro credit; manufacturing and beneficiation.

Issue 19 has articles on the alarming dangers of environmental exaggeration; e-waste in West Africa; illegal logging in the Congo basin; overfishing in Madagascar, et al Good government management favours economic growth, improves living conditions and contributes to a cleaner natural environment.

South Africa, 27 April: A few days before Women’s Day on 9 August nine years ago at age 14, I placed four pictures on my classroom board. My classmates identified these pictures almost immediately as Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and Albert Luthuli.

I placed another four pictures on the board asking my fellow classmates to identify the people they saw. There was an immediate silence. No one could identify Ruth First, Lillian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa and Sophie Williams even though they had been the faces of the Women’s March, which we were about to celebrate on 9 August a few days later.

Several years later, someone repeated the same exercise at my university and still the faces of those women were met with a deadly silence. I wondered then, as I do today, what hope there was for the thousands of other women who marched that day and the thousands more that organised protests and demonstrations for freedom during the Apartheid struggle.

As South Africans commemorate 27 April, for women the struggle for freedom continues. Most versions of history privilege forms of resistance like boycotts, strikes and protests that directly confronted the state or white capital. However, those who wage battles against state oppression today are asking; what about the everyday and whose freedom are we celebrating

The upsurge in the number of strikes in recent months in South Africa, from mines to farms, in what others have termed the “strike seasonÀ have one common characteristic. Very few women are seen on the frontlines of the protests and trade unions still have a “male face.À
Women are often seen in large numbers when it’s a service delivery protest. This shows that women are under represented in the mainstream economy where a wage is often negotiated between employer and employee and through collective bargaining between employers and trade unions.

Recent studies by Gender Links Botswana has revealed that ovr two thirds of women in Botswana (67) experience some form of gender violence in their life time.
The study says 44% of men admit to perpetrating violence against women . Roos van Dorp , Gender Links Program Officer told Global Post that while Botswana is doing enough to eliminate gender based violence , statistics still show that violence is still high and prevalent in the country.

his study explores how women cope in response to the masculine occupational culture and physical demands of underground work in South African mines. The involvement of women underground in South African mines is a relatively new phenomenon. Increased numbers of women underground miners is the result of targets set by the Mining Charter. Nevertheless, mining companies seem to find it difficult to meet their targets due to a number of challenges related to challenging domains that are historically dominated by men. The research looks specifically at these challenges and the coping strategies employed by women in mining, taking into consideration the masculine mining work culture and the physical demands of the different mining occupations. Working underground is experienced differently by men and women, with men having more experience and having been fully integrated into the occupational culture of mines. Due to this gender difference in the workplace, challenges and coping mechanisms differ among genders. A research strategy of participant observation was used to study this new phenomenon at a platinum mine near Rustenburg. The study draws on labour market theories that link labour supply and demand through the socially embedded processes of labour incorporation, allocation, control and reproduction. These four processes are used to guide a systematic consideration of challenges and coping mechanisms of women mineworkers in each stage of the processes related to change in the labour market.