- Title
- The effectiveness of the land redistribution programme on women’s quality of life: a case study of Buffalo City Municipality, Eastern Cape
- Creator
- Qayiso, Okuhle
- Subject
- Land reform -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Subject
- Land tenure -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Subject
- Quality of Life -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Date Issued
- 2021-12
- Date
- 2021-12
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/54281
- Identifier
- vital:46393
- Description
- The land question is a highly contentious issue in post-apartheid South Africa. Land is considered as a valuable resource for sustaining the livelihoods of people yet it remains one of the most sought after and contested resource in Africa owing to her colonial past. Black South Africans were also immensely subjected to land dispossession during the colonization by the Dutch and later the British and forced land removals during the apartheid era. Although this historical context from a lens of “race" is important to note here given how it shaped the South African geography of land ownership, there is nonetheless another dimension; that of gender. The main assertion driving this study is that due to a number of contextual factors (such as women's cultural status, economic inequality and poverty), land ownership between women and men is highly unequal whereby the former owns less and is mostly marginalized from land rights. This study thus looks at the extent to which land redistribution improves the quality of life for women in Buffalo City. The land redistribution program is part of the land reform policy which is a post-apartheid design and implemented for the purpose of redressing historical land dispossession and create redistributive land equality and tenure. This study employed a qualitative approach to ‘explore’ the experiences of women who are the beneficiaries of the land redistribution program as well as the perspectives of key informants who are the officials of the Rural Development and Reform Department. The thesis used an exploratory research design which was suitable for the understanding and unpacking of women's experiences with the land redistribution program. A major finding of this study is that the women who benefited from the land redistribution program have successfully progressed from small scale subsistence farming to large scale commercial farming, significantly improving their livelihoods. Nonetheless, the lack of financial capital is a critical challenge as the land redistribution program gives access to farms that need maintenance and renewal with financial grants that are barely enough for starting up. This study therefore argues that access to land should be accompanied by access to financial resources and capacity building to empower beneficiaries to use the land and other resources effectively and efficiently. It is recommended herein that the department should give beneficiaries full ownership of the land allocated to them as opposed to the thirty- year leasehold.
- Description
- Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences, School of Economics, Development and Tourism, 2021
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (117 pages)
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
- Hits: 156
- Visitors: 172
- Downloads: 36
Collections
NMU School for Economics, Development and Tourism
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Qayiso, O.pdf | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |