The above statement illustrates that there have been structural changes that have taken place in the Ntuzuma community over the years, especially in terms of the children of poor Black women having the opportunity to receive a formal education. Despite breakthroughs out of poverty experienced by some individuals and households due to the opportunities granted to people from previously disadvantaged backgrounds, many Black women have still not accessed these opportunities. It seems that despite the sense of communalism existing in locations like Ntuzuma (and KwaMashu assumes more of a communal setting) disparities among the residents still exist. For some of them their poverty level has reduced, while some—
either due to lack of awareness or any other factor—are still stuck at their initial poverty level.
Poverty is related to vulnerability to climate disaster. Poverty entails lack of or insufficient essential resources for livelihoods. Poverty manifested as lack of or insufficient resources to secure one’s livelihoods decreases people’s adaptive capacities to adjust to any disaster.
Sometimes, poverty is a result of deprivation of equal rights and opportunities for women and men. For instance, the most recent study by the UN's Women stipulates that globally women do thrice as much unpaid care and domestic work as men (UN Women, 2019). This situation increases women’s chances of securing decent livelihood for themselves.
However, it is important to note that the statistic given by the UN women (2019) varies across regions, cultures, and societies. For instance, in the 2018 report by the International Labour Organisation, ILO stipulated that women do four times more unpaid care than men in Asia and the Pacific. The ILO report recognises the contextual and locational differences in the level of women's burden of unpaid care and domestic work. For instance, it stipulates that while the global average hours of women's unpaid work as of 2018 was 76.2 percent, in Asia and the Pacific, the figure was 80 percent. The ILO report noticed that unpaid care work was the main barrier preventing women from getting into, remaining, and progressing in the labour force.
Coloureds, and at the bottom of the ladder was the Black race. The Blacks were assigned what seem to be degraded and disaster-prone areas of the country.
Most shelters in the study sites are poorly built. Most of them are shacks that were constructed for the residents during the apartheid era, to push them out of the city centres. However, the end of apartheid in the 1990s and the introduction and implementation of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP)26 during Mandela's presidency has seen many houses in these locations improved. The government has now built what is described as RDP houses, which are leased or given out for people to live. Many of the RDP houses are strong and built in a modern structural style. Despite that, there are many RDP houses, and other improved houses built by individuals for themselves in these locations, approximately fifty percent of the residents still live in shacks. The nature and quality of their houses render them quite vulnerable to any incident of flood in the area. During the face-to-face interview, a participant complained that
When it is flooding, since the walls are made of mud, they collapse, and the trenches which we have dug that assist in directing the water away from the house close up, and that leads to water entering the house, which is what happened with the last heavy rain—the house filled with water [UB].
Participants who expressed that the municipality helped them repair their flood-damaged buildings complained that the repair job was not correctly done. As such, their houses were still not able to withstand pressures caused by subsequent flood incidents. According to participants at (UC), “they [referring to the municipality] had built a wall around the house for safety reasons, and just before they were done, we experienced a flood, and the wall collapsed”.
Also pointing to the poor quality of the houses, another participant in KwaMashu (K2) shared:
“Whenever it rained, the wall fell.” A participant (UA) in uMlazi expressed the intense anxiety she experiences because of the quality of her house. In a noticeably anxious tone, she expressed: “I am really scared when there are floods, because water enters into the house
26Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is a South African socio-economic development policy framework initiated and implemented in 1994 by the African National Congress under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. The programme intended to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor and amend the ills of apartheid segregation by providing previously disadvantaged Black people with rural housing, electrification, land reform, clean water, public works, and improved healthcare.
through the roof and other open spaces. These houses are not of the best quality, so water easily gets inside the house, and we have to try and do damage control until the rain stops” [UA].
The nature of the locations resided in by the women also heightened their vulnerability. When the locational problem is combined with the infrastructural problem caused by the fragile structures in which they live, the women's vulnerability appears to heighten. Put differently, poor infrastructure in a poor location causes a double vulnerability. It is one thing to live in a shack and another thing to live in a shack that is in a disaster-prone location. It means facing a double vulnerability. Most of the participants in the study locations were facing this double vulnerability. According to a participant in uMlazi,
When it is flooding, since the walls are of mud, they collapse and the trenches which we have that assist in directing the water away from the house close up, and that leads to water flowing into the house. For instance, with the last heavy rain, the house was filled with water and I had to remove it myself. Sometimes you even have to go outside while it is pouring to try and open up those closed trenches. Life is tough during those rainy days. This area is not the best in terms of weather conditions; they can be really rough [UD].
In suggesting what could be done to avert the issue of houses getting flooded, the participant further reiterates as follows:
Since we live near a riverbank, I think it would be best that they surround the riverbank with stones or some form of reinforcement to keep them in place because when there are heavy rains the soil on the river band erodes into our yards. As time goes by, if these rains continue, this might cause our houses to be flooded away. That is what scares us the most. So, if they can do that for us, it would help.
Although it is not exclusively the case, it can be argued that the women's vulnerability, as shown above, corresponds to what scholars describe as physical. The physical vulnerability occurs due to the environment's geographical location; for instance, locations close to sea, mountains, and hills are susceptible to any environmental disaster. Liverman (1990, p.29) describes physical vulnerability as vulnerability due to “biophysical conditions” and explains
that the people vulnerable to this type are those living in flood-prone areas and areas likely to experience the high sea-level rise, drier conditions, storms. Reducing such vulnerability simply means moving people away from such locations or improving the environmental and infrastructural planning to avoid physical damage during climate hazards. This type of vulnerability can also be curbed through more proper environmental and infrastructural planning, primarily commercial and residential buildings.