Vaya the film is based on the lives of four young men from the Homeless Writer’s Project: David Majoka, Anthony Mafela, Madoda Ntuli and Tshabalira Lebakeng, and rooted in their experiences of coming to Johannesburg. Vaya the book brings you the people and stories that inspired the award-winning film.

The book provides a rare lens into life on the margins of Johannesburg. The stories are intimate and hard hitting, funny and heartbreaking, full of courage and humanity in a world that is both capricious and unforgiving. Stories of living on the street, of finding family and friendship in unusual places, and coming to the city full of hope and promise only to be betrayed by the very people one trusts most.

Mark Lewis’s haunting photographs bring into sharp focus life in the underbelly of the city.

Although South Africa’s informal sector is small compared to other developing countries, it nevertheless provides livelihoods, employment and income for millions of workers and business owners. Almost half of informal-sector workers work in firms with employees. The annual entry of new enterprises is quite high, as is the number of informal enterprises that grow their employment. There is no shortage of entrepreneurship and desire to grow.

However, obstacles and constraints cause hardship and failure, pointing to the need for well-designed policies to enable and support the sector, rather than suppress it. The same goes for formalisation. Recognising the informal sector as an integral part of the economy, rather than ignoring it, is a crucial first step towards instituting a ‘smart’ policy approach.

The South African Informal Sector is strongly evidence- and data-driven, with substantial quantitative contributions combined with qualitative findings – suitable for an era of increased pressure for evidence-based policy-making – and utilises several disciplinary perspectives.

The post-school education and training system in South Africa has been the focus of much attention since the establishment of the Department of Higher Education and Training in 2009. In the context of deepening inequality, poverty and unemployment, the need for a humanising, liberating and critical approach to learning and pedagogy in post-school education is becoming urgent. The rural and urban voices that speak in this book tell us that the current system is out of touch with the ways in which they are making a life.

Learning for Living challenges policy makers, researchers, educators and civil society organisations to think critically about the relationship between post-school education and the world of work, and about how to transform the post-school system to better serve the needs and interests of rural and urban communities. It issues a call to action, and proposes key principles to inform an alternative vision of post-school learning.

What is it like to be born dirt-poor in South Africa? Clinton Chauke knows, having been raised alongside his two sisters in a remote village bordering the Kruger National Park and a squatter camp outside Pretoria. Clinton is a young village boy when awareness dawns of how poor his family really is: there’s no theft in the village because there’s absolutely nothing to steal. But fire destroys the family hut, and they decide to move back to the city. There he is forced to confront the rough-and-tumble of urban life as a ‘bumpkin’.

He is Venda, whereas most of his classmates speak Zulu or Tswana and he has to face their ridicule while trying to pick up two or more languages as fast as possible. With great self-awareness, Clinton negotiates the pitfalls and lifelines of a young life: crime and drugs, football, religion, friendship, school, circumcision and, ultimately, becoming a man. Throughout it all, he displays determination as well as a self-deprecating humour that will keep you turning the pages till the end.

Clinton’s story is one that will give you hope that even in a sea of poverty there are those that refuse to give up and, ultimately, succeed.

Have slums become 'cool'? More and more tourists from across the globe seem to think so as they discover favelas, ghettos, townships and barrios on leisurely visits. But while slum tourism often evokes moral outrage, critics rarely ask about what motivates this tourism, or what wider consequences and effects it initiates.

In this provocative book, Fabian Frenzel investigates the lure that slums exert on their better-off visitors, looking at the many ways in which this curious form of attraction ignites changes both in the slums themselves and on the world stage. Covering slums ranging from Rio de Janeiro to Bangkok, and multiple cities in South Africa, Kenya and India, Slumming It examines the roots and consequences of a growing phenomenon whose effects have ranged from gentrification and urban policy reform to the organization of international development and poverty alleviation.

Controversially, Frenzel argues that the rise of slum tourism has drawn attention to important global justice issues, and is far more complex than we initially acknowledged.

South Africa’s social landscape is disfigured by poverty, inequality and mass unemployment. Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present argues that it is impossible to think coherently or constructively about poverty, and the challenge it poses, without a clear understanding of its origins, its long-term development, and it’s changing character over time. This historical overview seeks to show how poverty in the past has shaped poverty in the present. Colin Bundy traces the lasting scars left on the face of South African poverty by colonial dispossession, coerced labour and segregation; and by a capitalist system distinctive for its reliance on cheap, right-less black labour. While the exclusion of the poor occurs in very many countries, in South Africa it has a distinctive extra dimension. Here, poverty has been profoundly racialised by law, by social practice, and by prejudice. He shows that the ‘solution’ to the ‘poor white question’ in the 1920s and ’30s had profound and lasting implications for black poverty. After an analysis of urban and rural poverty prior to 1948, he describes the impact of apartheid policies and social engineering on poverty. Over four decades, apartheid reshaped the geography and demography of poverty. This pocket history concludes with two chapters that assess the policies and thinking of the ANC government in its responses to poverty. One describes the remarkable story of the social security programme developed by the ANC in government since 1994, and finds that cash transfers – pensions and grants – have been the most effective mechanism of redistribution used by the ANC, even though the party remains edgy and anxious about a ‘culture of entitlement’. A final chapter reviews the distribution and dimensions of contemporary poverty, inequality and unemployment, and considers available policy options – and their shortcomings.

Community development both a collective effort and an achievement driven by individual facilitators with the aim of lifting a community out of poverty. The sixth edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty continues to be a definitive guide for community development workers, students and practitioners alike. The book contextualises poverty and explains the process of community development.

It pays attention to the development environment and explains concepts such as asset-based community development and the social enterprise sector. In addition to context and process, the book details the skills required by a community development worker to function in the field. It also explains how to empower the development worker to train others in order to build capacity in the community and work towards breaking the cycle of poverty.

This edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty is strengthened by the inclusion of extensive support material. More practical case studies, specifically relevant to the South African environment, have been added and questions on the case studies are included in the book.

Poverty isn’t always a jumble of appalling statistics. Sometimes there are names, faces and stories to the numbers. It’s a cousin who’s finished high school but doesn’t have enough money to job hunt. It’s a colleague whose hand to mouth living still only gets her through half the month because her salary is just not enough. It’s a grandfather who worked for decades and got a retirement package so paltry he can’t pay his monthly bills.

When people you know and love are behind the data of impoverishment, it can be hard to determine how to help. It can be even harder to settle on how much to help without compromising on your own quality of life.

In We Need More Tables, Norma Young provides guidance on how to find a balance between alleviating poverty and yet maintaining a measure of the privilege one may have been born with. By exploring assumptions such as the myth of hard work and the fallacy of meritocracy, as well as historical methodologies of philanthropy in Africa, and suggesting the practice of impactful altruism – such as paying a living wage, building a solidarity economy or choosing regenerative investing – she shares an outline of how those with privilege can play a role in social justice.

Drawing on indigenous knowledge – fables, proverbs and learnings from African academics – We Need More Tables presents a framework of what is required to bring more of our communities to participate at the tables where decisions are made.

Norma Young’s insightful book provides us with realistic and practical ways of moving towards eradicating poverty in South Africa.

MaZwane has become a legend in South Africa as a pioneering entrepreneur – and an inspiration for those who ask questions about opportunities in the informal township economy. Her answer to those who doubt whether they can make it, is that you do it through perseverance, sacrifice, seizing opportunities, and offering superior products and service.

In 1989 Phumlaphi (‘Rita’) Zwane left KwaZulu-Natal to find work in Johannesburg after becoming a teenage mother. She could count on the love of her family, a matric certificate and her faith, but had no job prospects, and no knowledge of the business world or life in the big cities. Her memoir takes the reader from the tough times of finding her feet in Johannesburg, through a variety of jobs and life experiences, to finally fighting her way to success as a respected member of the township economy and starting the successful Imbizo Shisanyama business. MaZwane tells how she progressed from having virtually no income or permanent home to becoming the first person to formalise and commercialise shisanyama in the townships – and provide a comfortable home and legacy for her children.

Along the way, she befriended many people who contributed accommodation, job opportunities, advice, and companionship. With them cheering her on, she learned how to navigate the different and difficult aspects of the hospitality industry – and slowly reach her desired place of independent security. Conquering the Poverty of the Mind shows the true grit of a Zulu girl who believed in herself – and did it against all odds.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment and is renowned for being one of the most unequal societies in the world. In this context, training and education play critical roles in helping young people escape poverty and unemployment. Post-school Education offers insights about the way in which young people in South Africa navigate their way through a host of post-school training and education options. The topics range from access to, and labour market transitions from, vocational education, adult education, universities, and workplace-based training. The individual chapters offer up-to-date analyses, identify some of the challenges that young people face when accessing training and education and also point to gaps between education and the labour market. The contributors are all experts in their respective components but write with a holistic view of the post-school education system, using an unashamedly empirical lens. Post-school Education will be of interest to all researchers and policymakers concerned with the transformative role of further education and training in society.

Point Place stands near the city centre of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-storey apartment building is nonetheless home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalised by poverty and chronic unemployment. Emily Margaretten draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. Her sensitive investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. Her discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana - to care about or take notice of another - that young women and men use to construct `outside' and `inside' boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. Challenging the idea that Point Place's residents need `rehabilitation', Margaretten argues that these young men and women want love, secure homes and the means to provide for their dependents - in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.

C hika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, C hika was brought to the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Mitch and his wife, Janine operate.

C hika's arrival made a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-yearold, she delighted the other kids and teachers. But at age five, C hika was suddenly diagnosed with a terminal disease that no doctor in Haiti could help with.

Mitch and Janine took C hika to America, hoping that treatment there would enable her to go back home. Instead, C hika became a permanent part of their lives, as they embarked on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As C hika's boundless optimism and humour taught Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learnt that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost.

This is Mitch Albom at his most poignant, powerful and personal. Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed - a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

Sivosethu Ndubela - fondly known as Vovo - is a young Xhosa girl who lives in New Brighton, near Port Elizabeth.

Apart from growing up with the challenges of poverty, crime and limited opportunities, Vovo was orphaned when she was 13. This led to Tony Pearce going from a friend of the family, involved in an after-school dramatic arts project, to become the guardian of Vovo and her older sister, Vuyolwethu.

A few years later Vovo was diagnosed with a rare heart condition. She subsequently underwent two life-threatening open-heart surgeries. Her recovery continues to surprise her family and healthcare specialists, and her bravery in fighting for her life is a true inspiration.

By sharing the harsh circumstances of township life and the factors that have shaped her journey, Vovo reveals her remarkable resilience and it becomes clear why she is a Miracle Girl.

Conflict, crisis and instability form part of a chain of the dilemmas confronting development in much of the Arab world. With military intervention, occupation and civil war in Iraq and Palestine, most neighbouring countries such as Lebanon remain in a permanent state of flux. This book is unique in that it deals with some of the effects of regional instability on the development trajectories (or lack of them) in the Arab world. Using Lebanon as an example Fayyad explores the real meaning of the fragile states concepts that has become part of a dominant policy discourse in recent years - its implications for societal relations, civic space and the nature of socio-economic development.

Americans are overworked. After declining for a century through hard-fought labor movement victories, average annual work hours increased approximately 8 percent for all working adults from 1979 to 2016. In Worked Over, sociologist Jamie McCallum reveals how the battle over time on the job has been central to conflicts over capitalism from the beginning, how overwork is at the heart of the inequities and injustices in America's economy today, and why workers must fight to take control of the time they spend working. From Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley campuses, from late night Uber deliveries to later night strip clubs, from factories in Ohio to retail floors everywhere, McCallum explains how the contemporary American workplace exploits workers' time and constrains their lives. Whether it's the manager's stopwatch, the scheduling algorithm's dispassionate authority, or our own internal clock that pushes us because we're afraid of falling behind or losing our jobs, ordinary people have lost much say over when and how much we work. Work, more than anything else, dictates when we sleep, eat, raise our kids, and live the rest of our lives. Popular discussions of overwork tend to focus on striving professionals, but as McCallum demonstrates, it's the hours of low-wage workers have increased the most, and it's their working lives that remain the most precarious and unpredictable in a service-oriented, on-demand economy. What's needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle. Throughout Worked Over, McCallum offers inspiring stories of how the battle to win back control of time has been renewed today by those most vulnerable to the capitalist society's electronic whip. Combining the rigor of a scholar, the storytelling of a journalist, and the vision of an activist, McCallum shows that winning shorter hours will require a radical break from our current political and economic system. Worked Over is an inside look at why our lives became tethered to work -- and how we might regain a greater say over our work time and build a more just society in the process.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

Over the past century, American demographics and social norms have shifted dramatically. If trends continue, we should expect to see more people living alone, later-in-life marriages, fewer (and smaller) new families, and a majority-minority population that skews older and older. Americans' daily life and preferences have also changed, whether by choice or by force, to become more virtual, more mobile, and less stable. But housing today largely looks the same as it did in 1950. In Brave New Home, Diana Lind shows why the government-subsidized suburbs full of single-family houses are bad for us and our planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. Lind takes readers into the homes and communities that are seeking alternatives to the American norm, from multi-generational living, in-law suites, and co-living to microapartments, tiny houses, and new rural communities. Drawing on Lind's expertise and the stories of Americans caught in or forging their on paths outside of our cookie-cutter housing trap, Brave New Home offers a diagnosis of the current crisis in American housing and a radical re-imagining of the possibilities of housing.

This text brings a comparative analysis of the work of urban NGOs in the south based on The NGO in the City research project. It considers the roles, relationships, internal organization and programme performance of urban NGOs in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, South Africa and Peru. Detailed case-studies in the second half of the volume illuminate the critical factors necessary for effective NGO performance in the city and it defines a capacity-building agenda for NGOs to realize this potential in urban poverty alleviation.

'This book flips your world upside down. Daniel Markovits argues that meritocracy isn't a virtuous, efficient system that rewards the best and brightest. Instead it rewards middle-class families who can afford huge investments in their children's education ... Frightening, eye-opening stuff' The Times, Books of the Year Even in the midst of runaway economic inequality and dangerous social division, it remains an axiom of modern life that meritocracy reigns supreme and promises to open opportunity to all. The idea that reward should follow ability and effort is so entrenched in our psyche that, even as society divides itself at almost every turn, all sides can be heard repeating meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we think we are. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has become exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy's successes. This is the radical argument that The Meritocracy Trap prosecutes with rare force, comprehensive research, and devastating persuasion. Daniel Markovits, a law professor trained in philosophy and economics, is better placed than most to puncture one of the dominant ideas of our age. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within, as well as how we can take the first steps towards a world that might afford us both prosperity and dignity.

This book is designed to improve the education of elementary school children with low school-readiness skills (low SES children) by preventing their misidentification as learning disabled. It is built on the premise that the time and money spent on special education services will be better used if educators focus on the needs of children with low school readiness skills before their deficits become so great that neither intervention nor remediation will work, and before the childrenAEs self perceptions are so badly damaged that they quit trying to succeed and accept failure.Poverty Is NOT a Learning Disability challenges educators and parents to consider how low expectationsua odeficit perceptionoeucan affect a child's achievement and stresses optimism as a central tenet of elementary schoolsAE day-to-day teaching/learning programs and school-community relationships. The authors emphasize that an attitude of optimism is strongly connected to hope for the future and crucial to providing children with a positive vision of what they can accomplish. This resource also covers how to build trusting relationships throughout the school community, among teachers, administrators, the school staff, and parents.aChildren inevitably endeavor to fit the words, actions, and deeds of those around them into narratives of their own. The authors conveyahow vitally important it is foramembers of the education community to work togetherato ensure that youngstersareceive a view of the future that inspires hope and validates the potential of each child.

'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The Times A powerful exploration of the seedy side of Victorian London by one of our most promising young historians. In 1887 government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen. The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air. Award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire. A revelatory and prescient read about cities, class and inequality, the message at the heart of The Blackest Streets still resonates today.

In this illuminating examination of our national welfare policy, award-winning veteran reporter and writer LynNell Hancock offers an intimate, heart-wrenching, and beautifully rendered portrait of three women and their families as they struggle to find their way through the new rules and regulations of the public assistance system.

Hands to Work takes us on a journey within the day-to-day struggles of these women, describing their hopes, regrets, and deepest dreams. Hancock demystifies contemporary misconceptions of poverty and illustrates how welfare policy and reform have been conceived, offering a thought-provoking look at the most divisive questions about America's neediest citizens.