UWCScholar
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An investigation into ways in which TVET colleges could assist students to become self-employed through improved entrepreneurial training
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Mabutha,Tercia
The White Paper for Post-School Education and Training (2013) states that the purpose of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges is primarily to train students to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed in the formal labour market. They cater for adolescents wanting to enrol in vocational programmes after Grade 9 or finish school with a Grade 12 and learners who wish to complete their schooling. However,
mainstream South African qualifications, such as those funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training, have limited practical and workplace learning opportunities and are primarily theoretical.
Survival among medically insured and treated head and neck cancer patients with and without HIV in South Africa
(John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2025) Motlokwa, Precious Kefilwe; Ruffieux, Yann; Chinogurei, Chido
Objectives: To assess the association of HIV and overall survival among medically insured head and neck cancer (HNC) patients in South Africa and to examine factors associated with the type of treatment received. Methods: We used reimbursement claims data from a South African medical insurance scheme database from 1 January 2011 to 1 July 2020. We included individuals with at least two International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) codes for HNC and at least one cancer treatment code within 180 days of the HNC diagnosis. We used logistic regression to identify factors associated with receiving a specific type of cancer treatment and Cox proportional hazards models to examine factors associated with all-cause mortality. Results: We included 566 HNC patients, 49 of whom lived with HIV and 383 were male. Patients with HIV were substantially younger at HNC diagnosis (median age: 52.5 years) than patients without HIV (median age: 61.6 years). We found no clear association between HIV status and the treatment type received. The median survival was 3.78 years (95% confidence interval [CI] 3.01–6.08) and the five-year survival was 46.0% (95% CI 41.2%–51.5%). The risk of death was higher among patients with HIV than those without HIV (adjusted hazard ratio 1.68; 95% CI 1.00–2.81). Conclusion: Medically insured HNC patients in South Africa with HIV had higher mortality than those without HIV. This underscores the importance of tailored cancer care strategies for HNC patients with HIV.
Making and remaking life under threat: fenceline communities in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga
(Routledge, 2025) Rabbaney, Zaakiyah
In fenceline communities alongside coal extraction operations in South Africa, residents experience extreme environmental, social and economic conditions that can be traced to the country’s extractivist economy and race-based capitalist logic that created informal settlements in abandoned landscapes to which abandoned people have been relegated. These dystopian spaces present the immortality of coal’s impacts, even in its obsolete post-industrial extraction state. Because of this destruction, in addition to a lack of basic services and mass unemployment and underemployment, individuals are forced into a perpetual cycle of making and remaking life, underpinned by the afterlives of industrial coal extraction, and aggravated by the state’s relegation of impoverished families, who cannot afford formal housing, to abandoned and forsaken spaces. This article illustrates the extent of the deleterious effects of systematic environmental devastation on people whose lives have been historically and systematically devastated, and the ways in which their efforts to make life under such circumstances all too often turn out simply to reinforce their marginality and extreme vulnerability.
Amorous materialism: jousting with courtly love in Wole Soyinka’s the interpreters
(Routledge, 2025) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
Wole Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters (1965), presents a critique of European conceptions of romantic love, influenced by courtly love, that have not yet been considered in scholarship of this important novel. Through the animist materialist treatment of an ornate, heart-shaped wardrobe, inspirited by Sir Derinola, a parody of a medieval knight, The Interpreters presents trenchant criticism of the dominant courtly-romantic love complex. Soyinka’s materially embodied critique of an imposed idea of love constitutes a Yoruba-informed amorous materialism, where complex feelings in relation to love and reflections on love may be seen to re-enchant the physical world. Amorous materialism is Soyinka’s iteration of a postcolonial model of love, which is presented mainly in the relationship of Sagoe, one of the key interpreter figures in the novel, and Dehinwa, a female character often regarded as marginal in scholarship of the novel. This relationship is marked by the conventionally conceived features of romantic love, like exclusivity, loyalty and endurance, but the sentimentality, formality, courtesies and niceties of European models of courtly-romantic love are roundly rejected. Postcolonial paradigms of love, variations of which may also be seen in a range of other postcolonial literature, are conceptions of love that challenge colonially normalized ideas about love and romance. Soyinka’s representation of postcolonial love in its vitriolic, exuberant, masculinist disavowal of the European courtly-romantic love complex, however, inadvertently risks the charge of misogyny.
A second order NSFD method for a malaria propagation model
(Etamaths Publishing, 2025) Marime, Calisto Blessmore; Munyakazi, Justin
Standard numerical methods such as the implicit and explicit Euler and the Runge-Kutta methods have been used to approximate solutions of continuous-time transmission dynamics of many diseases. However, their convergence is conditional. Also, they do not always preserve the key features of the continuous-time model. Most times, they require a small time step which may increase the computational complexities especially for a long time horizon. In this paper we construct a nonstandard finite difference (NSFD) method to approximate the solution of a malaria propagation model. NSFD methods do not suffer from the drawback of time step restriction and preserve the physics of the problem under consideration. However their accuracy and rate of convergence remain a point of concern. In the construction of the NSFD scheme that we propose, we consider weights and denominator functions that depend not only on the time step but also iteratively on the state variables of the discrete model. This guarantees a second order convergence as opposed to earlier NSFD schemes which were independent of weights and their denominator functions were solely dependent of the time step. Numerical experiments confirm that the proposed scheme outperforms the first order NSFD in terms of accuracy and rate of convergence.