Investigating the Roles Played by Selected Agencies in Infrastructure Development

Urban areas that are the seat of power, cities, and capital cities are often the location and base of administration where policy allocations take place and the needs of settlements are discussed and met. Therefore, rural infrastructure needs are at the mercy of urban spaces decision making. This chapter proposes and attempts to purposively select some public agencies and examine their roles in balancing the urban-rural infrastructural dichotomy. The relevance of international donors in the efficiency of the public agency was also incorporated. The study further questions the success of some of these agencies and the mode of operation of these agencies at arriving at an improved infrastructure provision for the rurally excluded.

Community Engagement

The chapter presents the use of community engagement as a tool to facilitate rural development in (South) Africa. In its discussion, the researcher used desktop literature review to analyze, compare, and gain insights guiding the use of community engagement to enhance social transformation and sustainable development. The discussion is advanced from the historical background of the emergence of African universities and community engagement. The focus was reflected against the backdrop of the Western approach used among various global universities. In this view, the underpinning objectives, relationship with the researched, and the role of the researching university are detailed. Practical evidence of positive collaborative results within the (South) African communities within the rural and urban communities by universities and other organizations have also been provided. A contrast of various types of community engagement is also provided.

Good Governance and Rural Development in Africa

This chapter presents African indigenous knowledge as the missing link in achieving good governance and rural development in Africa. The failure of rural development projects in Africa has mostly been attributed to weak institutions and bad governance. Consequently, good governance has become the cornerstone of donors' development cooperation in Africa since the 1990s. While it is true that African public institutions may be weak, the analysis shows that the West contributed to this problem through European colonization of the continent as well as the imposition of Eurocentric one-size-fit-all reforms of the World Bank on indebted African countries. The chapter argues that to improve governance and rural development in Africa, there are well-established and effective cultural indigenous governance systems in the continent from which we can learn.

African Politics and Governance

This chapter argued that Africa had its own form of government before colonialism. Traditional authorities formed the type of government and promoted rural development. Traditional leaders promoted the welfare of the rural people until the arrival of colonialism. Long after the end of colonialism and the introduction of democratic dispensation, rural people are turning to traditional leaders because elected leaders are failing to understand the dynamics of rural people. Many studies argue for the dual governance of traditional leadership and elected leadership governance to benefit of the rural people. Empirical evidence in Vhembe District revealed that traditional leaders were still relevant in the democratic dispensation.

Adoption of Multimedia Instructional Material for Community Development in Africa

Instructional material has been recognized globally as means to offer access to learning content, so as to stimulate community development. There is still limited understanding about the potential of learning materials and the contribution that instructional development can offer to both urban and rural communities in Africa. This chapter provides an overview of instructional learning material for physical challenged learners in an inclusive environment. It shows the major strategies in design principles for leaning materials, such as multimedia elements, and approach components that represent inclusive assessment in rural communities. The physically challenged learner in this study is non-mental disorderliness: the hearing-impaired learners and the low vision learners. It also demonstrates that the inclusive multimedia instructional material has been created in concert with the grassroots community.

Funding Rural Development in Post-Apartheid South Africa's Land Reform Programme

The development of Africa is not only a problem to the Africans alone but also to the world at large. This is because some regions of the world also depend on Africa for their livelihoods. In Sub Saharan Africa one of the rural development strategies identified is land reform. Post-colonial African governments have argued that land reform would alleviate the majority of the people in the region from poverty, create employment, and address inequality. This is the position adopted by the post-apartheid government in South Africa beyond 27 April 1994. However, the South African post-apartheid land reform has had some significant complexities in its implementation – especially with regard to funding. Funding was impeded by widespread corruption in government. In addition, there has been immense lack of interest in making funds available for land reform in South Africa from non-governmental entities and donors.

Democracy, Decentralization, and Rural Development in Africa

Following the disappointing outcomes of the implementation of Western liberal democracy and decentralization, some observers have argued that the reason for these failures was because African countries have not yet developed the necessary culture for a successful democracy and democratic institutions. But are democracy and decentralization strange to Africa? The purpose of this chapter is to show that democracy and decentralization are not alien to Africa. Using the Yoruba culture of West Africa as a case study, and Afrocentricity as the theoretical framework, the chapter brings to the fore the principles of African cultural democracy that guarantee responsiveness and representativeness as well as ensure welfare improvement among these indigenous people. Suggestions are made on how these cultural democratic principles can be incorporated into formal governance to achieve more responsive governments in Africa.

Redressing Spatial Inequality in Rural Municipalities Through Service Delivery

Spatial inequality is a common challenge in some of South African municipalities. The level of service delivery is presented as one of the indicative factors, amongst South Africa's spatial history, using the case of Impendle Municipality. Using the qualitative methodology, the study investigated styles of governance as influential factors in spatial, inequality from three ages, being the colonial era, apartheid era, and the democratic era successively, with focus on rural areas as marginalised neighbourhoods. Subsequently, the study has identified possible factors which explain the continued backlog in service delivery in such areas, some being lack of coordination between tiers of governance, conflicts between municipal officials and the traditional authority, and lack of resources and capacity. Recommendations such as transformation of government relations and emphasized support amongst others were outlined as solutions to these matters.

The Facilitative Role of Institutions in Poverty Reduction

The constitutional requirements for the South African municipalities to adopt a developmental character and implement policies of local economic development present a favourable institutional framework to provide rural people with opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial activities. This chapter explores specific measures to exploit the tourism-based economy to benefit the local people adjacent to conservation areas. Using literature, the chapter first presents a brief historical background to socio-economic conditions around the land question in South Africa. Secondly it presents strategies to combat in particular unemployment, and then finally discusses the present as well as the possible future constraints that people face and are likely to face in these areas. This chapter then explores specific measures to exploit the tourism-based economy to benefit the local people adjacent to conservation areas. It finally discusses the present as well as the possible future constraints that people face and are likely to face in these areas.

Adoption of Microfinance in Entrepreneurship Development Amongst Rural Women in Vhembe District

This chapter investigates a group of rural women in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa who adopted microfinance-based entrepreneurship for self-empowerment and poverty alleviation. The chapter is anchored on multiple theories of empowerment, social capital, gender and development (GAD), and women in development (WID). The chapter adds to the growing body of the women empowerment literature. This is a mixed methods chapter. Various instruments are also used to collect data. Amongst others, data were collected through face-to-face and telephonic interviews using (English-Tshivenda) cross-language open-ended questionnaire. In addition, data were also collected through key informant interviews (KIIs) and desktop approach. The concept of bricolage entrepreneurship based on social capital exploitation by the women entrepreneurs has been explained. This chapter established that women were capable of developing sustainable entrepreneur activities to empower themselves and to also fight poverty.