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…
On Saturday 25 February a group of 16 students from the University of Cape Town’s Students for Law and Social Justice (SLSJ) came to Khayelitsha to offer free legal advice to residents of RR Section. Facilitated by the SJC, a number of people came to seek advice – ranging from issues such as police brutality…
Cape Town has been awarded the right to host the World Design Capital 2014 (WDC2014) against stiff competition from cities across the planet, in large part because of the Cape Town Partnership’s bold and candid bid. The bid promised to use the year-long event to “deal with the vast imbalances that exist in our society”,…