The People’s Academic

Professor Francie Lund has made a significant difference to child and women poverty alleviation in South Africa. In 1995 she chaired the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support that led to the introduction of the Child Support Grant (CSG) in 1998. She has also championed the rights of those excluded from the formal economy, notably informal workers, particularly street traders.

Rhodes University is proud to have conferred an Honorary Doctorate on Prof. Lund at the graduation ceremony on the 11th of April 2015.

Professor Francie Lund well deserves the title of ‘people’s academic’ as she has fought long and hard to improve the living and working conditions of the majority of South Africans.

She is widely known as one of the key activists and policy drivers in the battle to address child and women poverty in South Africa. In 1995 she chaired the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support that led to the introduction of the Child Support Grant (CSG). It is a landmark of progressive post-apartheid South African social policy.

Prof Lund trained as a social worker and sociologist, and she has a Master’s Degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Built Environment and Development Studies and the Director of the Social Protection Programme of the global research and advocacy network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising).

11 million children on the Child Support Grant

Eleven million children in South Africa are currently on the R320 per month Child Support Grant according to the 2014 South African Child Gauge of the Children’s Institute (www.ci.org.za). Children in need up to the age of 18 qualify for the grant, which is paid to the primary care giver.

“I am just amazed by the positive effect of this grant in terms of the improvement in child nutrition and increase in school attendance, among other things,” says Prof Lund.

The importance of good research

“This improvement is based on solid empirical research, which not only determines whether the programme is achieving its aims, but also dispels the widespread public cynicism that the grant encourages women to have more children, and is wasted on items like cosmetics. These beliefs are not supported by large surveys or smaller qualitative studies,” continues Prof Lund who has authored a number of significant articles and reports on South African social policy, including authoring Changing Social Policy: the Child Support Grant in South Africa (HSRC Press).

She characteristically combines research and theory with on-the-ground partnerships, and has been a champion of engaged research for three decades. As part of her WIEGO work she spends time with host families of informal traders in Durban to experience out how they live and what they do with their Child Support Grant.

Heading a household of nine

One host family is headed by 28-year-old Nodumo Koko. She looks after a household of nine people in Chesterville, a formal township 10 kms

from the Durban city centre.

Prof Lund explains that her main source of income is her informal ‘restaurant’ at her stall at Berea Station. She is known as a good cook and she produces tasty meals with no electricity and minimal running water - she uses gas, and gets water from a tap near her stall.

In 2011 when Prof Lund first visited Koko, her two children Yolande (11) and Xolo (3) were both receiving the Child Support Grant.

Xolo’s grant was used to pay his crèche fees, so that his mother could go to work to earn for the household. She pays the fees the moment she receives the grant.

Yolande’s grant paid for the transport to her school, situated three townships away - a school with a high academic standard, as opposed to the school near their home, which has a poor academic standard. Yolande is very bright and doing well at school, and Nodumo says the best opportunity in life that she can give to Yolande is to ensure she gets a good education.

The link between women’s income and childcare

As an extension of the work Prof Lund does within WIEGO – on both child support and with women who work informally - she is currently exploring the connection between women’s income and childcare provision.

“There’s a lot of the research about children’s rights and children’s development but there is almost no research about whether childcare enables women to participate in the labour market,” says Prof Lund.

“I don’t see how we can talk about women’s economic empowerment unless we look at women’s ability to earn. To this end we started the global Child Care Initiative which is busy with research in Asia, Latin America and Africa that illuminates this link, concentrating on poorer women who work informally. We intend to contribute to the growing movement to put childcare on the map and to motivate for more government and community-based support for childcare facilities.”

The greatest job creation environment

Expanding on the issue of economic empowerment, Prof Lund believes that the greatest job creation environment in South Africa is the informal sector.

“By addressing the needs and issues of this sector we encourage positive participation and growth in the informal economy, and we to start to address the unemployment problem, which is arguably the biggest problem we have in South Africa,” she says.

Millions of people in the informal sector

For fifteen years WIEGO has argued that the millions of people in the informal sector – who are either harassed or treated as non-existent – need to be recognised by government and the private sector, appropriately regulated and assisted by government and the local councils in which they operate.

Take Warwick Junction as one example. It is the city of Durban’s primary transport hub, with 460 000 commuters every day and more than 5 000 traders operating here, most of them informal. That’s a significant number of people in one space, contributing to the economy.

In 2000 Prof Lund was the lead consultant for the technical task team that developed a policy for the informal economy and informal workers in the City of Durban. The policy was passed in 2002.

Business on the pavements

Before this, most informal traders in the City of Durban did business on the pavements, which created hostility with the formal traders or retailers.

Without a safe space to store their goods overnight, the informal traders protected their goods by sleeping next to them. On top of this, their goods were, and still are, frequently confiscated or damaged during police raids.

The conditions in which they operated were generally unhygienic. Cow-heads, a Zulu delicacy, were boiled over open fires on the pavements, with excess water and grease drained into the city’s stormwater system.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the City of Durban and the eThekwini Municipality was proactive about seeking solutions to these problems, but informal traders countrywide continue to face considerable difficulties.

Informal traders need legal trading areas

“Informal traders need access to legal trading areas, storage facilities, lighting, clean toilets, clean water and well-managed sewerage. They need security and they need the trading areas to be cleaned by the local municipal services. No one likes dirt or rats,” says Prof Lund.

With support from WIEGO’s Caroline Skinner and from Asiye eTafuleni, an informal sector-focused NGO, a precedent case was heard in 2014 that may significantly assist informal traders. In March 2015, the police practice of confiscating and damaging goods when evicting street traders was found to be unconstitutional and invalid.

Occupational health and safety for informal traders

Prof Lund is also running a policy and research programme to ensure that policies are put in place to improve the conditions under which informal workers operate, including access to health services and occupational health and safety. She works with Laura Alfers, a Master’s graduate of Rhodes University, on this project.

“Informal traders who do business at trading sites all over South Africa need proper emergency evacuation policies in the event of fires, riots or other disasters. They also need to have access to state healthcare facilities in the areas where they trade. It doesn’t make sense to force them to go to clinics in the areas where they live because many leave home before first light and return home after dark.”

Health screenings

WIEGO, in partnership with NGOs such as Asiye eTafuleni, has supported health screenings for informal traders, where, for example, the women who cook mielies on open fires for a living often develop respiratory problems.

“To make their fires, they use whatever is available, whether it’s old bits of wood coated in paint or bits of melamine, and the chemicals released when they burn them can be harmful,” she explains.

The occupational health and safety programme has learned a lot from the model developed by SEWA - the two million member Self Employed Women’s Association in India.

Innovation and exploitation in the informal economy

As part of her WIEGO work, Prof Lund travels extensively and has seen the many different ways in which informal sector traders work in different countries.

“In Accra, Ghana’s capital city, you have girls coming from the far north of Ghana who don’t speak the main language spoken in Accra and who are exploited as ‘head load porters’. They carry the goods on their heads for the informal traders and it is extremely hard work for very little pay,” she explains.

“WIEGO colleagues ran a health registration campaign for the head load porters because they did not know they had access to free health care. This is one of many, many examples why the rights and needs of workers and traders in the informal sector need to be researched, understood and addressed.”

If we don’t address these needs, and recognise the invaluable research and policy development of people like Prof Lund, we will never get to grips with unemployment or make the most of the twin sister of our formal economy. We will also be neglecting the opportunity to establish a more egalitarian society in South Africa and worldwide.

The Director of the Rhodes University Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Professor Robert van Niekerk, and ISER Professor Extraordinaire, Professor Vishnu Padayachee, said of Prof Lund:

“She has contributed through her research, teaching and social activism in welfare reform, to a greater realisation of the promise of an equitable, inclusive social citizenship embedded in the South African constitution. She powerfully symbolises the possibilities of rigorous, engaged scholarship to meaningfully contribute to the social transformation of society.”

A family of conscience

Professor Francie Lund grew up in Pietermaritzburg where her mother and father, Betty and Max Lund, were both medical doctors.

Dr Betty Lund worked at Edendale and Dr Max Lund worked at Grey’s and Edendale. Both of them worked and served their community throughout their lives.

“Both my parents had a real commitment to good health services for all and my mother in particular had a very strongly developed sense of justice. She was a member of the Black Sash and of a feeding scheme for children called Kupugani,” says Prof Lund.

“She also had a strong sense that the government and country needed to be functional even when the wrong political party was in power. She would say ‘the Nationalist Party is evil and we must oppose apartheid, but we still need to go down to the city hall and pay the phone and electricity bill’.”

After matriculating, Prof Lund headed for Cape Town where she graduated with a degree in Social Work and Sociology. “I wanted to be a doctor but they did not teach girls Physics and Chemistry at my high school when I was there. This discounted any attempt at studying medicine, but it worked out well as I fell in love with Sociology.

“What really grabbed me in Sociology was the awakening of my awareness that there isn’t one history; that different people interpret the world in different ways, and that the world is not only determined by what men do in war but rather by the everyday relationships between people.”

After graduating she worked at Dingleton State Psychiatric Hospital in Melrose, Scotland in the late 1960s. Maxwell Jones, a South African-born psychiatrist, who was pioneering the benefits of group therapy, headed it. He believed that group therapy for psychiatric patients was far more beneficial than isolation and routine shock treatment.

“His approach was one of healing and hope, as opposed to the general feeling of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter’ associated with psychiatric institutions at the time. This approach is well accepted today,” explains Prof Lund.

She subsequently took time off to hitchhike around Greece and Turkey for a year, work in a food factory in Sweden, packing broccoli and peas, and complete a Diploma in Community Development at Manchester University.

In 1973 she returned to South Africa where she took up a lecturing post in the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town.

The Head of Department at the time was politician and political analyst, Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, whom she describes as “an absolutely brilliant teacher”.

Eight years later, in 1981, she took up a post in the Centre for Applied Studies at the then University of Natal.

She found this “extremely stimulating” as it was one of the earliest applied social research institutes in Africa and certainly the first in South Africa. The institute then became the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and subsequently the School of Built Environment and Development Studies. She has been based here for the past 30 years.

One of her most ambitious and useful research projects was the 1990 and 1991 study of all of the racially separated departments of welfare in the bantustans, homelands, and provincial and national welfare departments, which laid down a benchmark for the future integration of social services.

She has contributed to a very significant degree to the establishment of social policy as an area of academic inquiry in South Africa. Her course in social policy extending over the 30-year period was consistently amongst the most popular in the academic programme in the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.