The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
South Africa reported it fist case of COVID-19 on 5 March 2020. While the first cases were imported, local transmission has led to a rapid increase in the number of cases. As of 21 April 2020, more than 3,400 cases and 58 deaths had been confirmed. On 15 March, President …
The Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology Dr Blade Nzimande announced the results of the survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council of the impact and awareness of the coronavirus amongst South Africans that is currently sweeping across the world, including the country.The survey comes amidst the unprecedented …
The COVID-19 pandemic has a devastating impact on the immediate environment due to its fast spread from person to person and on surfaces, and the implications that it poses in society. Following that the virus can survive on surfaces for about nine days, it is noteworthy that handling precautions of …
In these Regulations, unless the context otherwise indicates, a word or expression to which meaning has been assigned in the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa Act, 2000 (Act No. 13 of 2000), underlying statutes, the Disaster Management Act, 2002 (Act No. 57 of 2002) and the regulations made by …
To date 44292 people have been tested largely in private laboratories. A total of 47541 tests have been completed, of which about 6000 were performed in the public National Health Laboratory Service. This is way too few considering the size of our population and other important factors such as inequality, …
The COVID-19-induced global recession, together with the economic effects of steps taken by the South African government to address the pandemic domestically, has made a challenging situation increasingly untenable. Persistently low growth and rising budgetary support for state-owned enterprises had led to a deteriorating debt sustainability outlook prior to the …
South Africa Power Report 2020/21 is the fourth in a series of easy to digest studies on key energy industry segments presented by African Energy’s consultancy group. The reports are intended to provide executives, financiers, investors, policy-makers and other stakeholders with a concise but authoritative document that provides an overview …
By many measures, the world is still in the early stages of a deep and profound transformation in energy, and industrial and agricultural processes. The aim of that transition is to achieve new policy goals for modern societies – among them, deep cuts in carbon dioxide and other warming gases. …
The report states that South Africa has a pivotal role in global mining, and it sets out a framework for the future sustainability of the local industry. "In recent years, the South African mining industry has had a declining contribution to the country's gross domestic product (GDP), which has led …
In essence, the notion of benefit sharing is recognition of the natural rights of affected communities over mineral resources in their traditional and historical homelands. Communities have a right to benefit first—culturally, economically and politically. These rights can be seen from the prism of both immediate as well as long-term …
Subsistence livestock production in Mpakeni community, South Africa, is crucial to enabling rural households to diversify their livelihood and spread risks. However, the frequent reoccurrences of drought have resulted in shortages of nutritious pastures in Mpakeni’s communal areas, posing significant threats to livestock production. While exposures to drought conditions in …
Actions to address different forms of malnutrition are typically managed by separate communities, policies, programmes, governance structures, and funding streams. By contrast, double-duty actions, which aim to simultaneously tackle both undernutrition and problems of overweight, obesity, and diet-related non-communicable diseases (DR-NCDs) have been proposed as a way to effectively address …
South Africa is one of the countries with the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB). According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics, 322,000 TB cases reported in South Africa in 2017. The highest TB incidence rates reported in Western Cape province in South Africa and reported rate was 938 per …
For the first time, this report brings together official data on governments’ revenues and subsidies associated with fossil fuels in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (referred to collectively as BRICS). It offers initial recommendations on aligning BRICS's fiscal policies with a clean energy transition.
The Department of Environmental Affairs in South Africa has been implementing a Natural Resource Management (NRM) programme that has been contributing towards the restoration of rangelands for several decades. Although contributing to adaptation, the NRM programme is not measuring the impact of its intervention in terms of Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA). …
National development banks (NDBs) and development finance institutions – domestically focused, publicly owned financial institutions with a specific development mandate – are poised to play a role in bridging the investment gap for climate-compatible infrastructure in developing countries. But delivering on the Paris Agreement will require NDBs to transition from …
The devastating drought in Southern Africa has seriously eroded the capacity of affected farming households and communities to produce in the 2019/20 season, which has already started in some countries. There is urgent need to scale up systematic recovery support and invest in resilience building initiatives to address the root …
Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) is the region with the lowest percentage of households with coverage to at least basic water of all regions and also lags behind basic sanitation coverage. The analysis looks at access to services, institutional structures, funding sources (including from governments, donors and households), funding channels, …
A record 45 million people in the 16-nation South African Development Community (SADC) face severe food insecurity in the next six months. Persistent drought, back-to-back cyclones and flooding have wreaked havoc on harvests in a region overly dependent on rain-fed, smallholder agriculture. With temperatures rising at twice the global average …
UMFULA has addressed questions of climate science, climate impacts and decision-making processes for adaptation, including: How does the climate of central and southern Africa work? And how well do climate models represent the key processes responsible for climate? How might the climate of central and southern Africa change in future …
