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Democracy and Governance in South Africa - Oxfam South Africa

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Oxfam South Africa is a South African Revenue Service (SARS) approved Public Benefit Organisation (PBO 930 048 899 and NPO 153-684). Donations over R100 per tax year may qualify to receive a section 18A tax certificate. Applicable to South African citizens only.

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© Copyright Oxfam South Africa 2024.

Reject Oil and Gas Exploration – Save our Oceans

Beyond engaging with policy and policy makers, our climate justice work is also focused on movement building in climate change affected communities. We have been at the forefront of this work first in the extractives space but have now expanded the work beyond extractives.

We have been supporting Amadiba Crisis Committee since 2016 and now support their current calls to keep Shell away from our oceans. This month, we joined activists at protests across the South African coastline on 5th December to call for an end to the planned three-dimensional seismic survey because of its potential detrimental effect on noise sensitive sea life and the livelihoods of communities along the coast who survive on eco – tourism and subsistence farming. Click here to hear more from Nonhle Buthuma, Amadiba Crisis Committee spokesperson. This work is part of our work supporting communities affected by extractivism and climate change.

Hear from our grantee, Amadiba Crisis Committee

COP 26

Our focus on climate justice led to our participation at the Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where Salima Hamada form our Saving Lives Building Resilience programme represented us. She highlighted the work we do on climate justice through our various projects including waste recycling and building urban resilience. Salima is based in our Comoros, East Africa Climate Change project. This project is in partnership with UNHABITAT and will strengthen urban resilience, promote disaster risk reduction and increase climate change adaptation in Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique and the Union of Comoros over four years.

Oxfam South Africa was chosen as a partner on this project because of our experience in building Disaster Management Guidelines for South Africa through our partnership with the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs. We have already helped the Mozambique government complete their guidelines and early warning systems and look forward to having other countries join in.

Disaster Management guidelines became very useful for helping South Africa manage and regulate the country and its activities when the Covid 19 pandemic struck.

Watch Oxfam’s SBLR Programme Manager detail our Disaster Management Guidelines work

Waste Recycling

Our climate justice work is also a cornerstone of our climate justice work through the Waste Recycler project. Oxfam South Africa has been in partnership with the City of Johannesburg and the City of Ekurhuleni on this since 2009.

The waste recycling sector allows for environmentally sustainable development and provides jobs, especially for women and migrants in South Africa. This fits into our great vision of reducing vulnerability by helping vulnerable groups develop sustainable livelihoods. Waste recyclers should not just be recognised as waste collectors but entrepreneurs who sort and sell the waste collected.

Through our interventions the recyclers now have city sponsored land with structures built for sorting, we also fundraised for plastic and other recyclable processing equipment which makes the work more sustainable than just sending the recyclables to a scrap yard. Our vision is to ensure that recyclers are part of the bigger plastic value chain and we have made some progress in this endeavour through our partnership with the Plastic Alliance.

Poverty as Violence

We also supported our partner Women on Farms with their call for Feminist reparations, a farm worker women’s demand for dignity. The campaign was about highlighting poverty as violence. It built on the fact that for far too long farm women have endured many injustices – their land was stolen, they became slave labour and others ruled over them and this campaign called for them to reclaim what was forcibly taken from them and own it.

This campaign was also accompanied by a report that looked at the experiences of farm worker women and called for a Living Wage which is about moving beyond a Minimum Wage. Feminist reparation includes a social wage which is not only a salary, but access to productive land, adequately funded universal public healthcare and education which can all be financed through government declaring a wealth tax on the top 1 per cent of richest South Africans.

The Hunger Virus

Women face hunger more often than men, due to disparities in income, limited access to employment or means of production and cultural practices that put them last or allow them smaller portions when food is in short supply. This is according to our 2012 Hunger Report.

Click here to read more about it

It became clear at the height of the Covid pandemic that South Africans are increasingly going hungry. By the end of 2020, more than 24 million people were living in stressed or higher levels of food insecurity, compared to 13.7 million people who did not have access to enough food prior to the pandemic. The hunger crisis was deepening globally and South Africa was one of the countries in the spotlight.

“With the unemployment that is skyrocketing in Makhanda and the effects of COVID-19, people are not able to have informal jobs…Hunger is real in this town,” – Zameka Chibi.

Oxfam International released a global briefing document that showed that by the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, a number potentially more than the people expected to die from Covid 19.

Click here for the report

Listen to the interview to find out more

Food Security and Women

Oxfam South Africa supported two food security projects, one in Eastern Cape and another in Western Cape. Working with partners we harnessed the power of women by supporting food security and livelihoods in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape, Ntabankulu and the poorest urban areas of Cape Town, Vrygrond. We donated containers which were used as kitchens for cooking for the community in two soup kitchens. These efforts helped vulnerable partner communities to mitigates the extreme crisis caused by the protracted Covid-19 pandemic.

In these projects food was cooked daily for vulnerable community members facing hunger. More than a 150 000 meals were served in over 7 kitchens in Vrygrond , Cape Town while more than 1 200 people were fed four times a week in Ntabankulu, Eastern Cape. Women were also taught baking, cooking and other skills through these programmes. The food kitchens also became a venue for GBV awareness workshops which led to higher GBV reporting in both areas and also led to greater awareness of women’s rights and on how to report a GBV case to police.

Movement Building

We support movement building across South Africa by working with and supporting initiatives like the Makhanda Development Initiative which was recently launched in Makana Municipality. In these initiatives we also focus on developing women leadership and changing negative perceptions and stereotypes about women leadership.

This year Oxfam South Africa also launched the Makhanda Development Initiative in Makana Municipality. Activists and grassroots leaders gathered to call for accountable governance in Makana Municipality. They spent two days discussing the current state of the municipality and ways to change the status quo.

Makana Municipality has been wrecked by maladministration and water shortages that have threatened the lives and livelihoods of people for more than 20 years. It is also plagued by inequality, unemployment, and poverty. Participants at the launch of MADI discussed and developed socioeconomic and political strategies towards building the Makana “We Want”. Some of the focus topics included Transparent & Accountable Governance, unpacking the role of Women and Youth in Development in Makana and Climate Justice.

Participants also discussed the implications and impact of a non-transparent and unaccountable local governance in the Makana Municipality on the daily lives of residents.

The Makhanda Development Initiative will advocate for an integrated approach between government (Makana Municipality), the Knowledge Hub (Education Institutions) and the Community (Makhanda Civil Community Coalition) so that that all can join forces and commit to building a new Makhanda.

The Makhanda Development Initiative has a vision of Makana developing into an economically viable, diverse, socially stable community so that all residents can benefit from its developmen and all stakeholders at the launch committed to realising this vision

Watch the Makhanda Development Initiative launch

Holding IFI’s Accountable

As South Africa received more and more funds from International Financial Institutions to support Covid 19 relief efforts, our Global Impact programme focused more on the role of IFIs in development. This led to the revival of the SA/Africa CSO NDB Working Group, co-chaired by Oxfam South Africa and African Monitor. This network was formed in 2018 during the time of Civil BRICS when South Africa hosted the 10th BRICS Summit in Johannesburg. The SA/Africa CSO NDB working group seeks to engage the NDB and its Africa Regional Center (ARC) on its role in South Africa and the region, in coordination with BRICS civil society

The group prioritises certain thematic areas, namely country systems, gender, public-private partnerships (PPS) and the private sector. NDB has a focus on mega projects, similar to other International Financing Institutions (IFIs), which typically use a top-down approach. It is important to see how these projects impact on poverty and inequality. The working group identifies the need to take a pro-active approach to shaping and forming institutions such as the NDB and the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) group. The working group also focuses on the importance of safeguards, the role of youth, enhancing civil society funding, ensuring broad-based funding among development financing institutions (DFIS) and enhancing access to information from these institutions.

Accountable Governance on GBV

We support two feminist movements, the Call to Action collective and Shayisfuba. These collectives have been instrumental in the fight against GBV and ensuring government is held accountable for its actions and plans.

As part of the collective we helped to raise awareness on GBV and the National Strategic Plan (NSP) for GBV through education, research, advocacy and information provided on our and the other partners social media platforms.

We also continue to train many feminist activists in our Feminist Political Economy Activists School to ensure feminists are equipped with the information to continue probing the government on its GBV plan, which has just seen its second co-hort trained recently.