Michael Rogan

Rhodes University | RU · Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU)

Resumen Con datos de la primera ronda de un estudio longitudinal con métodos mixtos realizado en junio y julio de 2020 por la red WIEGO en colaboración con organizaciones de personas trabajadoras informales de doce ciudades, se evalúa el impacto de la actual crisis pandémica multidimensional (sanitaria, económica y de cuidados) en las responsabilid...

Résumé Avec la pandémie de COVID‐19, la crise sanitaire et économique s'est doublée d'une crise du travail de soins. Tous les travailleurs en ont pâti, y compris dans l'économie informelle. Les auteurs exploitent les résultats d'une étude longitudinale menée par le réseau WIEGO en juin‐juillet 2020 auprès de travailleurs informels de douze villes....

Résumé Les auteurs présentent les conclusions d'une étude dirigée par le réseau Femmes dans l'emploi informel: globalisation et organisation (WIEGO) sur les effets de la crise du COVID‐19 sur les travailleurs informels. L'analyse porte sur quatre professions et onze grandes villes de cinq régions. Il y est question du travail et des revenus, de l'a...

Resumen Se presentan las conclusiones de un estudio dirigido por la red Mujeres en Empleo Informal: Globalizando y Organizando (WIEGO), en el que se investigan las repercusiones de la crisis de la COVID‐19 en diferentes grupos de personas trabajadoras informales y en sus hogares en términos de empleo, ingresos, alimentación y hambre, cuidado y otra...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has led to a health, economic and care crisis for all workers including those in the informal economy. This article draws on data from the first round of a mixed‐methods longitudinal study conducted (in June 2020) by the research advocacy network Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in partnership wi...

Many developing countries face a rapid increase in overweight and obesity, inasmuch as the prevalence has now nearly converged to levels observed in high-income countries. Among other factors, the rise in obesity is caused by a nutrition transition involving higher affordability and consumption of heavily processed or otherwise unhealthy foods cont...

This policy paper reflects the latest research insights on the impact of South Africa's lockdown on informal workers. It assesses the extent to which informal workers are able to access national government support and highlights key intervention priorities.

There is widespread recognition, both internationally and in South Africa, that the measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 have impacted particularly negatively on informal workers, whose jobs are precarious, who often depend on daily earnings for survival, and who lack legal and social protections. However, it is also likely that these impacts ha...

Improving access to higher education is an important strategy for achieving equity in the labour market. Against the backdrop of the ‘massification’ of higher education in a number of countries, most notably in the UK during the 1990s, a growing literature on graduate un/employment has aimed to investigate whether the graduate labour market has abs...

In the early part of the post-apartheid period in South Africa, a ‘feminisation of the labour force’ coincided with an increasing concentration of women in unemployment as well as in informal and low-paid work. In other words, and as observed at the time, an improvement in female labour participation did not seem to ‘buy’ much for South African wom...

As South Africa prepares to implement a national minimum wage for the first time, a number of questions about the potential benefits of a minimum wage have emerged. However, most of the South African literature, to date, has been concerned with the country's high unemployment rate and not on the quality of employment. In particular, there has been...

South Africa is one of only a handful of countries in which the prevalence of child stunting actually increased during the period (2000–2015) in which global progress towards child health was being monitored. One section of the literature suggests that stunting is a largely rural phenomenon in South Africa which is explained by high rates of povert...

We investigate the formation of minimum income aspirations in South Africa, a country characterised by high poverty rates and high and rising rates of inequality. Although a few empirical studies have explored income aspirations in South Africa, this is the first study that analyses nationally representative micro-data. We add to the broader empiri...

In this chapter, we aim to illustrate some of the forms taken by informal employment in the global south and how these can best be understood by adopting a wider analytical lens than has been applied in much of the precarious employment literature. We draw on the findings of a recent study of the working conditions of urban informal workers from 10...

More than two decades since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the place of small-scale agriculture in rural development, poverty alleviation and food security remains ambiguous and highly contested. However, there is now some new evidence that official income poverty estimates in South Africa may be underestimating the contribution of rural,...

Purpose This paper explores the perceptions and experiences of women and men who work as informal waste collectors in four different cities. The purpose of this paper is to map out how and to what extent occupational, political-legal, economic and social dynamics are experienced differently by gender in a highly vulnerable segment of the urban info...

An emerging body of research has shown that there are large inequalities in access to higher education in South Africa. There remains a gap, however, in identifying how factors such as schooling background, academic performance, race and gender are linked with key higher education outcomes. In particular, the significance of these factors for first...

The identification of one household member as the head of the household remains a feature of household surveys conducted by Statistics South Africa. While the analytical relevance of this practice has been critiqued and while many national statistics agencies have abandoned the concept of a household head altogether, researchers in South Africa oft...

In this study, we compare subjective and money-metric measures of poverty in South Africa using data collected in the 2008/09 Living Conditions Survey (LCS). In addition to collecting detailed information on expenditure, the LCS asked respondents to provide an assessment of the economic status of their household, ranging from “very poor” to “wealth...

Recent work has shown that the gender gap in income poverty has widened in post-apartheid South Africa even though overall poverty levels have declined. One of the main criticisms of money-metric studies of gendered poverty differences is that income is only one dimension of poverty and that other measures of welfare may better reflect the relative...

Background: The association between work and health has not been well explored in the context of economically developing countries, largely due to inadequate data. Objectives: The objective of this study was to identify the association between informal wage work and health in South Africa using a newly available data set that includes detailed i...

In measuring gender differences in the risk of income poverty, many studies use female headship as a proxy for gender. However, a number of well-documented concerns with the use of self-reported headship as an analytical category have suggested that headship is often a relatively blunt unit of analysis. Against the backdrop of a large and growing d...

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics and poverty status of female- and male-headed households in South Africa using nationally representative household survey data from the October Household Surveys (1997 and 1999) and the General Household Surveys (2004 and 2008). These years (1997-2008) represent a period for which there is an extensi...

This study investigates whether trends in the extent and depth of poverty in South Africa over the past decade have been gendered. We examine whether females are more likely to live in poor households than males and whether this has changed over time, and how poverty has changed for female-headed and male-headed households. We use data from the 199...

It is widely accepted that researchers have an obligation to inform survey participants of research results. However, there is little evidence on the effectiveness of various dissemination strategies. The emerging field of knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) may offer insight given its focus on techniques to enhance the effectiveness of communica...

High levels of unplanned pregnancy among young people are a huge public health problem in South Africa. However, use of emergency contraception (EC) remains low. Studies suggest that providers constitute an important link to increasing access to EC use. The aim of the study was to provide greater insights into the attitudes of providers towards EC...

It has become evident that sexual health and HIV-risk behaviours cannot be addressed effectively without paying adequate attention to constructions of gender and sexuality. While the body of literature examining these themes is growing and becoming more nuanced, there is still a significant gap in our understanding of the relationship between gende...

HIV and AIDS remains one of the most serious problems facing youths in many sub-Saharan African countries. Among young people in South Africa, gender is linked with a number of HIV-risk behaviours and outcomes. The literature suggests that factors such as socioeconomic status, intimate partner violence, and several psychosocial factors contribute t...

Use of emergency contraception is low in South Africa despite high rates of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. Existing studies have demonstrated that women access emergency contraception from commercial pharmacies rather than from public health facilities at no charge. Research has also demonstrated that awareness of emergency contraception is a...

Far-reaching changes in the post-apartheid period in South Africa are likely to have affected gendered access to resources. In this Article, we use nationally representative household survey data to examine whether trends in the extent of income poverty over a recent ten-year period have been gendered. We find that females are more likely than male...

Since emergency contraception (EC) products became available over the counter in South Africa in 2000 a number of studies have emerged. This paper reviews the growing body of literature on EC in that country. Standard computer database searches identified published articles and reports on EC in South Africa. The level of awareness of EC is fairly l...

The HIV/AIDS epidemic and its disproportionate effect on the lives of young people has been a source of major concern in South Africa. Research has, until now, focussed on the broad cultural determinants of risky sexual behaviour among this group and on the barriers that impede the promotion of health seeking behaviour in the context of HIV/AIDS. S...

In a globalising world, the pace of human mobility has increased alongside flows of capital and goods. Regional integration and trade liberalisation have accompanied these trends and have, arguably, received more attention from both academic researchers and policymakers. Human movement, however, cannot be de-linked from other social and economic ev...