Saturday, January 1, 2000

Contact


internafrica@gmail.com

5 comments:

Ann said...

Thank you for InternAfrica. I am a resident in one of the more affluent suburbs of Cape Town. I am involved with various associations that have some influence. In the responsibility for housing that we all share, my role has become to understand the pressures of housing so that I can share information with the constituted community based organisations in this area. We all need to understand the issues, not only the activists and politically aware, but also the comfortable surburbanites who seem to think they are too entitled to care.... So I appreciate what you are doing here - presenting the case for housing from a range of sources. I find it hugely useful. Please keep doing the good work here. Thanks, Ann

Unknown said...

Thank you for all the work you are doing for communities in the Cape. I live in Johannesburg and identify with Ann's description of comfortable surburbanites working full time in Rosebank and living in the Northern Suburbs.

In December 2009 I got out of my comfort zone and committed to actively making a difference. I set up a website www.nyeupeinitiative.com appealing to foreign nationals like myself to help end xenophobia by contributing towards development in Alexandra. I believe that together we can do more. The service delivery gaps are an opportunity for communities to do something to help themselves.

Your blog has been useful in giving me information that I can pass on to the communities I interact with in Alex. I am even more inspired by contributors like Ann who encourage and offer support through much needed networks for initaitives that need that extra boost to keep going!

Keep up the good work representing those without voices InternAfrica.

In Solidarity.

Joyce

Thato Tholo (Thatohatsi Phoebe Tholo) said...

I also would want to buy an RDP House the Government does not cater houses for us working class black people, It's imposible to buy a legit house in this country I think the government should have low cost housing that they can sell to us because it's useless if people can buy RDP Houses for R10 000 and never get cought...especially people who donnot qualify.

Unknown said...

Your article on informal settlements in Cape Town points to conflicting figures provided by government but the Google Maps link to informal settlements is far from accurate. Kuyasa in Khayelitsha is a formal township built of bricks and mortar, moreover most houses there have solar water heaters installed through provincial funding. Several of your informal areas are likewise B&M construction. Many of your informal areas are doubled up with one community receiving three or four exclamation marks which smacks of ignorance or alarmism.
Is this just another case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Africannabis said...

Chris if you zoom in with Google Maps you will notice that there are named sections of the informal Settlements that do NOT have a name because they are so close to each other and there was no space to add the information in.

The exercise to transfer and make publicly available on Google Earth the names of the informal settlements from the GIS information from the City of Cape Town took the better part of a year.

Yes development has happened, in some places – their name remains the same, and Google Earth at the time of the exercise had one of four icons available. From the perspective of shack fires they did not have a fire icon available at the time, thus the exclamation mark.

That shack fires and floods have displaced this many human beings from their homes in the past 12 years, is hardly alarmist. One child burning to death, is reason enough for this entire website, alarmism aside.

Other corruption related stories aside.

As for the figures – well you would note as we have pointed out, they do not reflect correctly against each other and certainly not on the ground. Now there's a case for alarm!