Business Alignment of Information Technology Governance Planning at a Professional Council in South Africa

Information technology governance is often out of sync with business processes in many organisations. This was also the case for a professional council in South Africa, which experienced a lack of a coherent IT system design and disparaged registration, finance, and external verification systems inherited from previous systems that were incompatible with new system innovations to ensure efficient operations. This resulted with employees struggling to register social science professionals during lockdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic. After recognising this, a South African professional council embarked on a digital transformation process to modernise the organisation by implementing an architectural aspect of information governance. This chapter used one of the three Control Objective for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) concepts - align, plan, and organise - to explore the business alignment of information technology governance planning at a professional council in South Africa. From a business perspective, the COBIT framework provides an integrated, top-to-bottom approach to IandT governance. Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used as the research method in this critical emancipatory study because the project required collaboration between the researchers and study participants in defining and solving the problem. The Look phase: getting to know stakeholders so that the problem is defined on their terms and the problem definition is reflective of the community context;the Think phase: interpretation and analysis of what was learnt in the Look phase;and the Act phase: planning, implementing, and evaluating, based on information collected and interpreted in the other phases, were followed. The chapter established that no common enterprise architecture was adopted to aid in the development of business process, information, data, application, and technology architecture layers, as well as reusable building block components. A process flow of information governance components is suggested. It is hoped that the flow chart will aid in the alignment of information technology governance and business goals, as well as to ensure continuity in the event of disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

An experience of youth migrants in the context of COVID-19 nation-wide lockdown

Background of the study: COVID-19 nationwide lockdown in South Africa has disrupted nearly all aspects of youth development. The COVID-19 nationwide lockdown crisis impacted youth migrants severely. The effect of COVID-19 on the youth has gained increasing scholarly attention;however, little has been done to address the circumstances of youth migrants. Purpose of the study: The study seeks to examine the effects of the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown on migrant youths living in rural parts of South Africa. Methodology: The present study used a qualitative research method, and purposive sampling to sample 20 youth migrants between the ages of 18 and 24 years. Findings: The study findings revealed that youth migrants had trouble in providing for their basic needs since they could not do piece jobs due to the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown. Originality/value: This study calls for the development of a youth migration policy in South Africa that will promote youth migrant human rights and outline key strategies that the government should take to support youth migrants as a vulnerable group. © 2023, RJ4All Publications. All rights reserved.

An Exploration of Youth Political Disengagement in the City of Cape Town

The Electoral Commission of SA shows that only over eight million out of more than 26.2-million registered voters voted in the 2021 local government elections. This is a cause for concern when this figure is compared with other elections, which amounted to a preliminary turnout of about 30.5% by Monday 01 November 2021 at 21h00. Thus, the lower voter turnout is arguably a true reflection of the citizens frustration with and distrust of politicians. This study aims to explore the socio-economic factors that contributed to young people’s apathy towards politics and discouraged them to engage in voting during COVID-19 and to suggest both short- and long-term solutions to address the youth political disengagement in South Africa. The qualitative approach was adopted in this study, followed by a convenient sample of 20 youths. Individual interviews was used to collect data. The collected data was anlysed through thematic analysis. The finding revealed that socio-economic factors such as nation-wide lockdown COVID-19 restrictions, youth unemployment, electoral system, poverty prevented young people from participating to political engagement. Accordingly, this study recommends for multifaceted electoral reforms in South Africa that will give voters the power to hold elected representatives accountable and provide clear details of who should hold a representative office. © 2022 Thulani Andrew Chauke. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

EXPLORING THE PERCEPTIONS OF YOUTH ABOUT COVID-19 AND THE USE OF VACCINE IN SOUTH AFRICA

This study explored the perception of the youth about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and the use of vaccines in South Africa. This study used a qualitative research methodology, a phenomenological research design, convenience and purposive sampling. The study population were 14 youths between ages 15 and 35 years who live in the rural area. Data were collected using structured interviews in a face-to-face and telephonic interview. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. COVID-19 affected the world and humans severely;people especially the young adults were unable to socialise due to the fear of contracting the virus. This study revealed that because of the loss of many lives due to COVID-19, the youth hold different views regarding COVID-19. The study detailed mixed views from youth about COVID-19 indicating that it is a manmade virus;others do not have faith in the vaccine but majority agreed that COVID-19 is a deadly virus that could be curtained by vaccination. The study recommended that youth should form part of the team by the government to create public awareness on the importance of taking the vaccine to curb the spread of COVID-19.