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This chapter discusses the role of language in the transformation of two African institutions of higher education, namely the University of Botswana (in Botswana) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (in South Africa). The transformation of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which is aimed at addressing the inequalities and other ills of the apartheid era, has taken on board language issues. For instance, isiZulu is being developed and promoted to join English as a language of scholarship. In contrast, the University of Botswana’s transformation does not stem from a political background of oppression. The institutional transformation has to do internationalization and the conversion into a research-intensive university. This transformation, unlike at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has not taken a strong move to develop and promote Setswana (Botswana’s national language) as a language of scholarship.

The Comrades Marathon is a world‐renowned ultra marathon that takes place yearly between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa. It attracts athletes from around the world, and boasts a participation of more than 14,000. The purpose of this article is to determine the impact that this marathon has on the provincial economy – a manufacturing‐based economy.

Spending data of participants and their accompanying spectators were compiled by means of surveys and participants were split into categories based on their origin. The provincial Social Accounting Matrix is used to quantify the impact of this spending stimulus on production, income and job creation within the province.

The results show that Comrades Marathon contributes significantly to the provincial economy and that more than 600 jobs are dependent on the event.

It has a larger impact on the local economy than many similar sport events and this is attributed to the specialised nature of the event as well as its status as an ultra‐marathon.

This research is one of few on ultra‐marathons and the focus is on participants’ spending behaviour during the event.

Family consumption studies have been criticised for using an individualistic or dyadic approach to explore the types of influence strategies that children use to sway parental decisions. In this study, attention is refocused on the voices of South African families within twenty-first-century familial interactions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the prevalence of pester power in South Africa, and to understand the influence strategies used by children and the different categories of products that children attempt to influence the purchasing of. Parental responses to these strategies are also explored to determine their effectiveness.

An exploratory research design using quantitative, but mainly, qualitative data, was used to draw insights from 135 families to understand intra-familial negotiation tactics within the context of family consumption and everyday family life. Thematic content analysis was used to extract themes from the responses.

The findings suggest that children use everyday family interactions as a resource to select successful pester and negotiation tactics. These children have a relatively deep understanding of how to influence their parents by using different tactics, such as emotional appeals, product requests, purchase justifications and bad behaviour. Children were found to have an awareness regarding the circumstances during which these tactics are more effective.

The contribution offered by this paper is first to build on calls for perspectives in the African context, when marketing to children and second, to add deeper understanding of the categories that children from South Africa influence, and the negotiating tactics that they use. This also contributes to an understanding of the intra-familial interaction processes leading to the eventual emergence of influence strategies and concomitant consumption behaviour.

Since the 1994 regime change many South African public libraries have been destroyed by the communities they were serving which raises questions about how communities perceive these libraries. With the loss of activist library organizations, few insights are gained from activists or critical librarianship on how to respond. In this context, the chapter examines public library social inclusion and poverty alleviation initiatives, and government conditional grants to public libraries.

Using a transformative paradigm, a qualitative approach and thematic analysis, the chapter examines recent literature on public libraries and social inclusion, and local annual and parliamentary reports. A mini-survey yields case study material.

The findings augment the scarce store of recent evidence on South African public libraries. Most provinces had built new libraries, upgraded others, and installed information and communication infrastructure to enhance access. Problems included governance, fund wastage, and staffing. The libraries have great potential to improve their relevance for local communities.

The poor survey response rate and lack of a comprehensive national database on public libraries limits the research. Annual reports are uneven in comprehensiveness, making comparison difficult.

The chapter recommends (i) creating a national information system to monitor service delivery via the grants and enable rigorous investigation of their impact and (ii) increased government support for public library social inclusion initiatives.

First hand evidence from local librarians and official reports demonstrates the grants’ effect on public library promotion of social inclusion and shows what is possible in a situation of historical inequities.

This study examined the effect of good stewardship on agency costs and firm performance. The panel data analysis with the Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) estimator was employed to analyze the effect of good stewardship on agency cost and the impact of good stewardship on the performance of 37 South African firms from 2007 to 2016. The findings of this study reveal that good stewardship has a significant positive effect on agency costs as well as firm performance, implying that the promotion of good stewardship should be accompanied by suitable strategies to manage additional agency costs.

This paper aims to examine the role of electronic governance (e-governance) in enabling asylum seekers’ access to public services in the city of Durban, South Africa. Because of COVID-19, the government scaled down its operations, limiting access to public services, including among migrants.

Because of COVID-19-related restrictions, a systematic review was conducted of the relevant academic literature as well as the information portals of relevant government departments, municipalities and research reports on migration and refugees in South Africa. A total of 320 peer-reviewed research articles were identified. These were filtered and 68 relevant articles were selected.

The study found that asylum seekers have limited access to public services via information communication technology-enabled mechanisms. Whilst the city government has embraced e-governance, it is still in its nascent stages.

This study was limited to a desktop one because of COVID-19 restrictions and it focused exclusively on asylum seekers. Therefore, its findings can only be generalised to this category of people.

Future studies on this subject should gather data from all categories of migrants to gain in-depth perspectives.

All spheres of governance in South Africa should recognise asylum seekers as a constituency that deserves access to public services. E-governance can facilitate easier access to these services, and policies need to be aligned with this reality.

This study examined the efficacy of e-governance in enabling access to government services by asylum seekers during COVID-19. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other study on this subject was conducted during this period.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the state-of-the-art assistive technologies (ATs) developed for people living with visual disability and those that are used in academic libraries around the world as a way of proffering solution to the challenges faced by visually impaired students in accessing information.

The data used for this paper were derived from website of companies that specialize in ATs for people living with disability and the library website of the top 14 universities in the world based on the 2020 QS world ranking of universities.

This study found that foremost academic libraries in the UK and the USA have integrated various ATs into library services as information access mechanism for students living with visual impairment. The study found that the most commonly used screen reader software is the Job Access With Speech (JAWS). The study also found that one of the institutions has a mission statement on their website, clearly stating support for people living with disability.

This study was conducted using only the 2020 QS world ranking of universities. It would be interesting to see results of academic libraries from Africa based on their ranking.

The paper provides highlights on trends that may inform academic libraries in the quest to providing ATs for students living with visual impairments. This paper may assist academics libraries who are at the brink of decision-making on use of ATs as information access mechanism to the visually impaired students.

This paper is the first to provide librarians with ideas and innovations on specific ATs used by leading academic libraries in the world.

The high prevalence of bullying in South African schools in recent times is a cause for serious concern. Bullying is traumatic and has a painful, corrosive and damaging impact on children, families and society. Hence, curbing the problem before it spirals out of control in secondary schools requires immediate urgent attention from all stakeholders of the school. The purpose of this paper is to report on part of the investigation done for a doctoral thesis (Singh, 2016), which looked at the factors contributing to bullying perpetration in secondary schools and on the basis of the findings, recommend a model that may be used to curb bullying in secondary schools. A qualitative research design was used to investigate the problem through an interview process with participants from secondary schools, as well as a circuit manager from the Uthungulu district of KwaZulu-Natal. The findings confirmed that the problem of bullying emanated at the level of the family, the school and the community. The paper concludes with the provision of a model to manage and curb bullying in these secondary schools.

A qualitative research approach, in particular a case study design, was selected to give a clear understanding of participants’ views and experiences (Johnson and Christensen, 2011; Mason, 2013). The design involved a social constructivist paradigm, which was primarily concerned with meaning and understanding people’s “lived experiences” and “inner-worlds” in the context of the conditions and circumstances of their lives, which in this particular instance was bullying in secondary schools, occurring within a social context, which was the school (Johnson and Christensen, 2011). Purposeful sampling was used to identify five secondary schools in the Uthungulu district of KwaZulu-Natal where the problem of bullying was most prevalent principals at circuit and district-level meetings complained about the high incidence of bullying perpetration in their schools.

This paper highlights the findings in respect of the factors contributing to bullying perpetration in schools and presents a management model to curb bullying in secondary schools in KwaZulu-Natal. Factors contributing to bullying: the findings from the empirical investigation avowed that the three key factors contributing significantly to bullying behaviour are located at the level of the family, the school and the community. First, influence at family level: “60–70 per cent of our learners come from broken homes”. An overwhelming majority of participants in all five secondary schools attributed the escalation of bullying in schools directly to the influence at the family level. Broken homes, poor upbringing, the absence of positive role models and the influence of media violence on learners have had a negative impact on the culture of discipline, teaching and learning in the classroom and the general ethos of schools. Second, influence at school level: “the foremost problem here is peer pressure”. An overwhelming number of participants identified several factors at the school level that contributed to bullying in secondary schools. Learner 3 (School A) highlighted the problem of peer pressure and the need to belong to a group as a critical factor in advancing bullying in schools. Third, influence at community level: “they come from that violent environment”. Participants explained that the absence of after-school programmes and a lack of facilities, particularly in rural communities, misdirected youngsters into engaging in other destructive vices such as forming gangs and indulging in drugs and alcohol, to keep themselves occupied.

Various studies have been conducted in South Africa to understand the phenomenon of bullying and violence in South African schools. While the current body of research highlights the problem of bullying in schools and provides some guidelines on what measures may be adopted to address the problem, the suggested methods are not effective enough, resulting in the problem continuing unabated. This study therefore suggests a model to manage and curb bullying in secondary schools in South Africa.

The sustainable green movement is significantly gaining momentum around the globe and South Africa needs to follow suit. However, such a movement needs to be significantly tested. It is therefore essential to present both foundation and supplementary research in the primary concepts within this topic in order to lay the groundwork for future analysis. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the cost‐effectiveness of the heat recovery ventilation (HRV) technology incorporated within Lincoln on the Lake, against a direct‐expansion (DX) ducted system of conventional practice utilising the life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) to determine if the sustainable option is the better choice.

This paper is a case study, based on a green building in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa using a ten step life cycle cost analysis.

In terms of the LCCA performed at Lincoln on the Lake, this case study has found that sustainable measures were far more cost effective over the 20 year study period than that of the comparable conventional system. The life‐cycle cost analysis tool has provided a simple, uniform and predetermined manner for which the life‐cycle costs of sustainable designs can be successfully quantified.

The value which sustainable building practices can pose, has not been fully realised among clients and professionals within the South African construction industry due to lack of proof that value incentives do exist. This paper, therefore, emphasizes that savings can be made over the long term by going the sustainable route.

This paper aims to focus on the need to ascertain harmony in records and archives management practices between the university archives, sports union and the various sport clubs at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in an endeavor to establish whether these fugitive records are being captured.

Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to investigate records and archives management practices in sport clubs on the Pietermaritzburg (PMB) campus, UKZN. Data are thus obtained through a questionnaire, interviews, observation and email correspondence. This triangulation of methods of data collection is designed to increase the validity and reliability of the results.

This study has established that there was much dissonance with regard to records and archives management practices and recommendations inter alia included their need for overhaul and the need for pro-activeness on the part of archivists to collect this heritage for future reference.

This study is only confined to the UKZN, PMB campus and not the entire university that constitutes a limitation. The findings may assist university authorities as decision and policymakers to ensure that records and archives management practices in universities are overhauled to prevent further loss of records. The study has focused on one genre of records, namely, leisure records, and there is a need for a comprehensive study on the entire university’s record-keeping system.

This paper highlights the plight of university archives and reiterates the need for an urgent review by university authorities with regard to their management.

This paper has used a number of data collection techniques to ensure reliability and validity of the data gathered. Physically checking the collections in the university repository to establish gaps corroborated with the research findings in an effort to establish the underlying cause of poor archival development.