Abstract
Attaining sustainable livelihoods in South Africa is challenging, especially for the urban poor. Trends such as unemployment, precarious employment, lack of policy support for informal livelihoods, and shocks like drought and pandemics frustrate the majority’s ability to achieve sustainable livelihoods, resulting in deterioration in assets. The sustainability of household livelihoods in South Africa, especially in low-income areas, was already challenging before the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 intensified livelihood struggles and is a crisis that has destabilised the adaptability of livelihoods. Working within the structuration theory and sustainable livelihoods framework, which highlights that households require a range of assets and economic activities to achieve positive livelihood outcomes, this study examined how households in Musina residential extensions, Limpopo Province, forge sustainable livelihoods amid the unprecedented raging COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. This study frames the pandemic as a context marked by rapid economic decline, which, in turn, results in hasty asset deterioration and might lead to the disappearance of most assets. The study employed a mixed methods approach, in which I conducted 126 short surveys to obtain the dynamics of households in urban Musina. Thereafter, in-depth interviews were conducted with 32 participants, purposively sampled from the surveys. The findings of this study revealed that households exercise their agency and utilise both individually secured and socially attained resources to survive. Wage labour, one of the individually secured resources, remains central to households’ survival. However, labour is also vulnerable to adversity because most households do not have a variety of resources to supplement it. Kinship-related assets such as family clustering, remittances, and child maintenance are the socially attained resources households use to forge sustainable livelihoods. While assets remain central in forging sustainable livelihoods, access is often a challenge as broader interconnected structural factors such as incompetence, nepotism and corruption of some state officials either facilitate or constrain access to government-linked resources such as grants, subsidies, and economic relief schemes. Despite these structural challenges, the narrative ‘we are nothing without government’ simultaneously exposes households’ vulnerability and the arguable ‘transformative’ role of government as a structure that these households cannot survive independent of, since urban livelihoods and attainment of assets are guided by state policies and laws. Overall, the findings of this study revealed unique ways in which households survive rather than attain sustainable livelihoods. Considering the uniqueness of livelihoods, this study therefore argues that there is a need to reconceptualise the term sustainable livelihoods to understand the relative experiences of household struggles. The study recommends grassroot engagement in addressing livelihood struggles and adaptation of individualised solutions as challenges are unique. The thesis further recommends aligned government support to households livelihood activities and relief measures both in terms of policy formulation, responsiveness, and applicability.
Keywords: Sustainable livelihoods; household assets; the State, migrants, South Africa, COVID-19