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Study Objective II
Analyse the resilience and sustainability of rural livelihoods and institutions in South Africa
Overall Theme 2: Resilience and Sustainability of Rural Livelihoods
1. From a local governance perspective, how have disasters and pandemics influenced livelihoods in rural sectors?
2. What are livelihoods in the area vulnerable to and what institutional factors contribute to their vulnerability or resilience? 3. How are rural communities expanding their income streams to improve the long-term viability of rural livelihoods?
4. How significant is the contribution of social networks and indigenous knowledge in strengthening resilience?
1. From a local governance perspective, how have disasters and pandemics influenced livelihoods in rural sectors?
Participants’ definition of disasters
This theme explores participants’ definition and understanding of disasters.
Definition of Disasters
Participants generally defined disasters as unexpected, uncontrollable events that disrupt daily life and cause widespread damage to property, infrastructure and livelihoods. These disasters can take various forms, including natural calamities like floods, storms and droughts, as well as public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. A recurring concept is that disasters are events that exceed the community’s ability to cope with them using their own resources, thus necessitating external intervention. Disasters are seen as events of significant magnitude that affect large portions of the community rather than isolated individuals. The loss of life, destruction of homes and interruptions to essential services like water, electricity and roads are key factors in defining an event as a disaster.
Participant 5
I think it is a about an incident or accident or whatever situation or catastrophe that causes damage or leads to loss of life or property. Then it depends on that particular incident or catastrophe’s magnitude.
Participant 1
I don’t know how to how to how to explain it, but it’s a potential calamity, yeah, that happens in in in in the members of the community. There’s a recent COVID 19 that, happened in 2020, 2021, and 2019, 2020, 2021. this municipality is a municipality susceptible to natural disasters, your floods, your storms, and all of those things.
Participant 2
It would be a situation that is uncontrollable that no one has maybe had a way of predetermining that it would occur and that runs out, of anyone’s ability to combat.
Participant 3
Anything that causes a disruption in people’s lives, in infrastructure, anything that threatens the people’s lives, it is a disaster because it has impact of leaving people homeless and without anything.
Participant 7
This is it’s a localised widespread phenomenon, which disrupts way of life or cause damage to property or loss of life, and it’s off magnitude that those who are affected by it cannot cope with returning their own resources. The coping mechanism. The coping mechanism plays a Major role. So if the community ones cannot cope using their own resources, it’s a disaster.
Focus Group Participant
From my understanding, a disaster is a certain incident that causes great damage or it causes loss of lives. We have this tendency of actually thinking that an incident that has affected me, we take it as a disaster. But a disaster must affect a larger scale of
the community.
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