Residents of Island in Khayelitsha TR section have been terrorised by rats for more than a decade. Situated between a highway and a blocked drainage canal, the residents also have to deal with the stench that comes from the canal which is infested with mosquitoes.
Editorial from Mail & Guardian newspaper on Friday 20 April 2012, regarding the pervasiveness of violent crime in South Africa’s informal settlements. If you want to understand the scale and complexity of the problems facing urban communities in South Africa, you could do a lot worse than visit Bramfischerville in Soweto.
On Tuesday 17 April 2012, the South African government joined representatives of 60 countries at the annual two-day meeting of the Open Government Partnership, an international, multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. As one of eight countries…
Published on the website of the Cape Town Partnership on 30 March 2012. Cape Town, home to almost 4 million inhabitants, is a highly differentiated and malleable city, filled with almost endless promise but also continuously undermined by a variety of constraints and pressures. The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award recognises and celebrates creative solutions…
New Service Could Improve Sanitation Conditions For More Than 350 000 People Living in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements The Social Justice Coalition (SJC) has made a formal submission to the City of Cape Town which outlines the need for a new service to maintain more than 13 700 permanent flush toilets in the City’s informal…
On 28 November 2011 the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and partner organisations submitted a formal complaint to Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, calling for a Commission of Inquiry with powers to investigate failures of the Khayelitsha police and criminal justice system. More information on the complaint can be found here. Two articles from today’s Cape…
This article by SJC Coordinator Gavin Silber appeared in the Mail & Guardian 0n 23 March 2012. The South African Human Rights Commission has declared March Human Rights month – with a particular focus on access to water and sanitation. The SJC has been participating in the HRC’s national Sanitation Hearings, aimed at highlighting…
Social Justice Coalition (SJC) members joined the Congress of South African Trade Union’s (COSATU) protest in the Cape Town city centre today. The protest – attended by various union movements and civil society organisations – called on government to address a number of issues facing poor and working class people in South Africa. These…
A joint statement by the Treatment Action Campaign, , Equal Education, Social Justice Coalition, SECTION27 and Ndifuna Ukwazi Join the Right2Know Protests this Week! We are civil society organisations who support the Right2Know campaign. For the past year our members have spoken out against the Protection of State Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) and protested against…
This article by Zackie Achmat and Fritz Jooste appeared in the Cape Times on 1 November 2011 The lived experience of people in informal settlements is a dehumanising defiance of the constitutional and moral obligations that require the state to treat every person as having equal dignity and rights. Uncollected rubbish, floating faeces and the…