The Plight of Women Against Housing Challenges in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

Abstract

This paper touches day to day social and economic issues affecting women bearing in mind the historical difficulties of women in South Africa during the apartheid years to participate in the main stream of the economy was without iota of doubt incomprehensible and thought-provoking precisely because women were not permitted to have their own houses. The paper unapologetically provides an empirical narrative account of the plight of women in housing. The paper argues that the notion of housing in South Africa is still one of the greatest challenges in the post 1994 dispensation due to an extremely complicated and disintegrated bureaucratic system that was inherited from defunct non-operational apartheid government. Issues of homelessness, unemployment, poverty and inequality are crucial to understand why women rights were violated and accounts for the reason for transformative shift to restorative justice in the post-apartheid democracy. Over 22 years of democracy, human rights violation and excessive problems of homelessness are still a sorry state of affair despite progressive improvement in human settlement. The qualitative study relies not only on historical facts but also triangulated empirical evidence of what was observed and engaged with key informants interviewed to made compelling conclusions and propositions about the plight of women in South Africa, especially in the Eastern Cape Province.