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Destination resilience is emerging as an important concept in the tourism management literature. This is because of the recognition that tourism needs strategies to cope with future shocks. The tourism disruptions caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the frequent occurrence of climatic disasters globally have made this need more apparent. Against this background, this study sought to analyse the enablers and barriers to tourism destination resilience in a post-Covid-19 Namibia. Data were collected in 2022 in the Erongo Region, which is one of Namibia's key tourism destinations, and it was also a major Covid-19 pandemic hotspot. A stratified cluster random sampling approach was used to collect data from towns that were grouped into three tourism strata: Tourism accommodation, tour operators, and tourism-related characteristic industry. The study identified several key enablers for resilience. At the individual level, these enablers include intelligence and academic ability, social competence, and self-efficacy. For enterprise resilience, the study findings underscored the importance of having management and staff that are imbued with self-determination to adapt, and the skills to deal with future changes, as well as the ability to collaborate. In terms of community resilience, the important enabling factors were the level of infrastructure construction, access to resources, and the presence of innovative tourism marketing and local people's traditional environmental knowledge. The major barriers to destination resilience were, namely, unprofessional customer service, lack of security infrastructure, insufficient investment in the sector, high tax on tourism products and lack of proper amenities. Given these findings, this paper contributes to the nascent literature on tourism disaster and crisis management in Namibia. It also draws research attention to the importance of small tourism and hospitality businesses as a pathway to foster more resilient businesses in the face of possible future shocks. The study recommends the establishment of appropriate tourism policies that are pivotal to building destination resilience, building capacity to plan and anticipate future changes and investing in durable infrastructure that can withstand economic disruptions and climate-induced shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the heterogeneity among households across locations, predicting the impacts of stay-at-home mitigation and lockdown strategies for COVID-19 control is crucial. In this study, we quantitatively assessed the effects of the Namibia government's lockdown control measures on food insecurity in urban informal settlements with a focus on Windhoek, Namibia. We developed three types of conditional regression models to predict food insecurity prevalence (FIP) scenarios incorporating household frequency of food purchase (FFP) as the impacting factor, based on the Hungry Cities Food Matrix. Empirical data were derived from the 2017 African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) Windhoek study and applied univariate probit and bivariate partial observability models to postulate the relation between food insecurity and FFP within the context of stay-at-home disease mitigation strategy. The findings showed that FFP was positively correlated with the prevalence of food insecurity (r = 0.057, 95% CI: 0.0394, 0.085). Daily purchases portrayed a survivalist behaviour and were associated with increased food insecurity (coeff = 0.076, p = 0.05). Only those who were purchasing food twice monthly were significantly associated with reduced food insecurity (coeff = −0.201, p = 0.001). Those households in informal settlements were severely impacted by food insecurity (coeff = 0.909, p-value = 0.007). We conclude that public health compliance should precede with cash or food support to poor households in balance with the need for long-term placement of control measures to fully contain COVID-19 or related infectious diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant remittances has generated a great deal of confusion and debate. This article aims to test three conflicting global and local narratives about the relationship between the pandemic and remittance flows in the South Africa–Zimbabwe remittance corridor. We refer to these as remittance pessimism, remittance resilience and remittance rerouting narratives. The article presents the pre-pandemic background context of migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa, the evidence for a shift from informal to formal remitting during the pandemic, and the implications of the remittance rerouting narrative for other corridors. We find that many Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa experienced severe economic impacts including unemployment, income loss and lack of access to COVID-19 relief measures. We conclude that there was a significant increase in formal, primarily digital, remittances during the pandemic and a decline in informal remittance conveyance. We highlight the need for more research in other remittance corridors to identify similarities and differences between them in terms of COVID-19 impacts and the shift from informal to formal remittances enabled by digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spaza shops are an important component of the South African township economy as they provide vital goods, employment and an income to most township dwellers. This notwithstanding, the sustainability of spaza shops has been problematic, with most closing down within the first few years of operation. Against this backdrop, this paper assessed the structure and operations of spaza shops in the Mankweng area and investigated the problems that inhibit their viability. A quantitative approach that necessitated the use of a structured and closed ended questionnaire was adopted to collect data from 50 spaza shop owners. A GPS device provided the coordinates utilised to map the spatial distribution of the spaza shops in the area. The results suggest that most of the spaza shops surveyed were foreign owned with the preponderance of Ethiopians (34%) and Somalians (34%). South African spaza shop owners constituted 26% of the sample. The study notes that although spaza shops generate income for owners and are integral to the township economy, they face a variety of challenges. These range from crime and theft, competition among many shops and a lack of access to credit facilities that could enable the expansion of the business. The study recommends that spaza shop owners forma union-platform from which they can share strategies of overcoming challenges. Such a union would also enable spaza shop owners to access funding from government schemes and private investors alike so that their operations are expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drivers of food insecurity in rapidly-growing urban areas of the Global South are receiving more research and policy attention, but the precise connections between urbanization and urban food security are still largely unexplored. In particular, the levels and causes of food insecurity amongst new migrants to the city have received little consideration. This is in marked contrast to the literature on the food security experience of new immigrants from the South in European and North American cities. This article aims to contribute to the new literature on South-South migration and urban food security by focusing on the case of recent Zimbabwean migrants to South African cities. The article presents the results of a household survey of migrants in the South African cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. The survey showed extremely high levels of food insecurity and low dietary diversity. We attribute these findings, in part, to the difficulties of accessing regular incomes and the other demands on household income. However, most migrants are also members of multi-spatial households and have obligations to support household members in Zimbabwe. We conclude, therefore, that although migration may improve the food security of the multi-spatial household as a whole, it is also a factor in explaining the high levels of insecurity of migrants in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xenophobic attitudes and actions are all-pervasive in South Africa in civil society and the state. Medical xenophobia refers to the negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees based purely on their identity as non-South African. This paper examines the extent to which xenophobia manifests itself within the public institutions that offer health services to citizens and non-citizens, based on primary research with Zimbabwean migrants who try to access the system. The paper argues that medical xenophobia is deeply entrenched in the South African public health system despite being a fundamental breach of the country's Constitution and Bill of Rights, international human rights obligations and the existence of professional codes of ethics governing the treatment of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the contemporary literature on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa has focused on the rural sector, with limited attention to urban areas whose inhabitants are equally vulnerable. Thus, little is known about how poor households deal with food insecurity under conditions of economic adversity and material deprivation in the urban environment. This article examines the strategies that poor urban households adopt to enhance their resilience in the face of food insecurity. Study results indicate that the resilience of poor urban households to food insecurity during a crisis situation such as that besetting Harare depends largely on 3 main factors: first, the resourcefulness of households in eking out a living through multiple income-generating activities; second, the existence of strong social links to rural households, which increases access to rural resources for urban survival; and third, the use of international remittances to increase household food security. In conclusion, the article argues that in a crisis situation such as that in Zimbabwe, survival largely depends on the ability of households to engage in multiple as well as multispatial activities that not only increase income sources but also reduce household expenses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]