The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Visit the archives.
Tom Fawthrop -
The long struggle of Nelson Mandela—from freedom fighter and political prisoner to president of South Africa—has, in death, received universal acclaim from world leaders.
Even George H.W. Bush, who was U.S. president when a white racist dictatorship held the predominantly black South Africa hostage, gushed with praise. UK Prime Minister David Cameron and other Western leaders past and present were similarly effusive.
So if the leaders of the most powerful countries had...
Christopher Zumski Finke -
When Emily Graslie started her YouTube program, "The Brain Scoop," out of a lab at the University of Montana, she couldn't find many role models that looked like her. Today, she's a popular Internet science educator—Chicago's Field Museum's first-ever "Chief Curiosity Correspondent"—whose viral YouTube shows often get hundreds of thousands of views. And she's still looking for that role model.
“There should be some woman on some show on some...
It is predicted that trillions of dollars of wealth will be transferred to the hands of a new generation of philanthropists in the next half-century. “It’s the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth that we've ever seen. (And) so much of what happens in the future will depend on what the rising generation of major donors (now in their twenties and thirties) will become. Will they do things very differently from the previous generation?", asks Caroline Hartnell of...
Have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?
Benjamin Bratton writes about entanglements of technology and culture - how technologies enable the making of certain worlds and at the same time, how culture structures how those technologies will evolve. The conceptualization of possibilities is...
“Racism remains the one conversation that we simply do not want to have in South Africa,” argues writer, activist and filmmaker, Gillian Schutte in this TEDx Johannesburg talk, which took place in December 2013. Schutte, who challenges racial stereotyping, says that our inability to talk about racism is one of the reasons that South African society remains untransformed. According to Schutte, every white person in our society must come to terms with, challenge and begin to...
