Blog

The Ulutsha Street Festival 2018 turned out to be an ideal family event on a typical windy winter day in Port Elizabeth. This year’s Festival once again highlighted how public spaces can be transformed into positive spaces for recreation and social interaction. Further, the Festival demonstrated how festivals can be used as both recreational opportunities as well as opportunities to raise awareness on key social issues, such as gender-based violence and violence against children.

How can a participatory approach enable a better understanding of the ways in which identity and intersecting inequalities block accountability processes? This is the question that the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation has been exploring in their most recent action research process with the Delft Safety Group. And this was the question that catalysed the development of a novel participatory visual research method - hand mapping. Read more in this blog by Gill Black, co-director and leader of health participation at the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation.

In 2017, Azwi Netshikulwe and Ncedo Mngqibisa, Researchers at the Safety and Violence Initiative (SaVI) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), conducted fieldwork in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng focusing on political assassinations and taxi violence. The fieldwork was part of a study conducted by UCT’s Centre for Criminology and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC) in collaboration with SaVI. This article is based on findings from this fieldwork.

The Inclusive Violence and Crime Prevention Programme (VCP) of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and its partners trained over 120 young people as youth leaders and ambassadors of safer communities in two provinces, Gauteng and Eastern Cape. The purpose of this training is capacity-building of young leaders who can then contribute to the building of safer communities and to reducing crime and violence, which is on the rise in South African communities.

The Seven Passes Initiative shows how supporting children with schoolwork creates a better society.

At the most basic level, we have a collective responsibility to make the streets in front of our homes safer. Not by exclusion, but by looking out for one another. The more we intentionally participate in street life, the safer our streets become.

The creation of a safe, non-commercial and welcoming public space in Cape Town is necessary to challenge the barriers cemented in the past which taint our experience of the present and keep us apart.

Migration has always been a hotly contested global topic and it will remain one, as long as there are inequalities in the world which render some areas more dangerous and impoverished than others. Although international migration policies have become increasingly liberal, national migration policies appear to be getting stricter and anti-foreigner sentiment seems to be on the rise. Why is this the case?

On the 27th of February 2018, the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town hosted a seminar with Azwi Netshikulwe and Ncedo Mngqibisa from the Safety and Violence Initiative (SaVI), titled The role of taxi associations as agents of social control and community policing. The researchers presented a case study of the role taxi associations play in community policing and social control in the informal settlements of Khayelitsha and Du Noon, in Cape Town.

All children are vulnerable to violence, yet wealthy countries lag behind in global efforts to solve it.