Food security, poverty and hunger are some of the 21st century global challenges. An estimated 1.2 billion people live in poverty, and most are in sub-Saharan Africa. Several efforts to reduce the devastating effects of hunger, poverty and hunger worldwide are implemented. One of the prominent intervention strategies is the Heifer International programme. In Zimbabwe, Heifer International (HI) is donating cattle to poverty-stricken and food-insecure households to eliminate food insecurity, hunger and poverty. However, much is not known about the contribution of the HI programme. Notably, HI has been implementing this programme for over a decade now. To unpack and determine the contribution of this programme to the people’s livelihoods, a cross-sectional survey design was adopted to collect data. The data were quantitatively analysed, using IBM SPSS version 26. Results revealed that the programme contributed mainly to the socio-economic well-being of the participating households. Participation in the HI was associated with increased income; training and education programmes; improved yields and land under cultivation; income-generating opportunities; enhanced asset position; and food and nutritional benefits. Consequently, the paper recommended the use of cattle ownership among the poor rural households to eliminate the devastating effects of poverty, food insecurity and poverty because it is a way of empowering poor households with the potential of dismantling perpetual dependence on external support. It also recommended a strategic partnership between the government and other private players for investment in animal feeds since the programme seemed to overlook this aspect.

Background: Enterprises in South Africa, especially in rural areas, continue to fail, despite the continuous support from government. A key contributing factor is that most enterprises’ support is channelled to exogenous factors without recognising their endogenous predisposition as well.Aim: This article isolated entrepreneurs’ endogenous attributes which if complemented with exogenous support could spur enterprise success.Setting: This study focussed on addressing enterprise failure in rural areas of Vhembe; however, the findings can be applied in other areas in South Africa and beyond.Methods: A sample of 81 participants was drawn using the snowball sampling technique. The qualitative data gathered from this sample using a semi-structured questionnaire were then analysed through Atlas-ti v8 from which 49 items were isolated. This informed a quantitative component that entailed the development of a 5-point Likert scale for data collection in the second phase of the study, where, subsequently, 280 respondents were engaged. The Principal Component Analysis was used to reduce the data dimension of 49 items to five principal components which accounted for 68.794% of the total variance.Results: The five principal components isolated were bridging-networks (38.044), self-belief (15.802), risk-awareness (6.144), resilience (4.532) and non-conforming (4.271). Further analysis was performed on data collected from 83 participants who met the 50% performance threshold using the linear regression. Bridging-network is the most important endogenous success factor in the study area, followed by nonnon-conformist risk-awareness, resilience and self-belief.Conclusion: Results conform to grassroots realities, thus, a framework anchored on this was developed to support enterprises grassroots enterprises.

Economic growth; exchange rates; currency and South Africa 1. INTRODUCTION South Africa, although one of the leading exporting countries in Africa for the last two decades, has also been subjected to much negative financial practices in the last five years. As reported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2015:2) despite seemingly increase in trade, in this country, during the last decade, net exports have been performing at a decreasing rate. Politicians in South Africa are blaming the political unrest as a major cause

In sub-Saharan Africa, universities are increasingly being called upon to contribute more towards combating poverty and promoting development in rural areas. Yet, it is still argued that universities are ivory towers, and as a result, their contribution to finding sustainable solutions to issues hampering the realisation of improved quality of life of people in rural areas remains unsatisfactory. This perception emanates from the universities’ apparent failure to articulate and demonstrate how they can achieve the desired goal stated above. Moreover, there are no universally embraced criteria for assessing the relevance of a rural area based university to the community it serves. This study was therefore carried out to determine the perceptions of University of Venda undergraduate students on what they believed were appropriate criteria for assessing the relevance of a rural area based university in community development in South Africa. Reflection circles, anchored on participatory research techniques, were used to engage the students. The results of the engagement were organised into sub-themes. The most prominent perceptions were: ‘A university has active long-term community-based development initiatives’; ‘A university is continuously addressing the real needs of the communities in question’; ‘University initiatives are creating jobs for its graduates and community members’; and ‘Continuous community requests for university assistance in solving the challenges militating against development’. The wide range of perceptions of students observed in this study is a useful input into initiatives seeking to develop an objective tool for assessing the relevance of a rural area based university in community development.

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