Overview

SCLC was established in 1987 in response to the threatened forced removal of the community of Lawaaikamp in George, under the Apartheid government. A group of activists, churches and Anti Apartheid service organizations joined forces in support of the Lawaaikamp community’s struggle to resist the removals.

Purpose

SCLC’s vision is for a rural countryside free from poverty, where people are able to live with dignity, the environment is protected and there is a more equitable access to and control over resources and opportunities.

SCLC aims to build the capacities of social movements for agrarian transformation by:

• Supporting and promoting farm workers and dwellers in organizing through national and regional workshops.
• Supporting and promoting local, provincial and international campaigns for change - in particular the Food Sovereignty Campaign.
• Raising awareness around the links between poverty and power compounded by market led economic and social institutions, systems and policies.
• Raising awareness around negative effects of patriarchy and skewed gender power relationships and supporting women in challenging these.
• Raising awareness around the destruction of the environment, inequitable access to and control over natural resources and sustainable alternatives for food sovereignty.

SCLC aims to build alternatives towards agrarian transformation by:

• Supporting clusters of emerging farmers, ecological food producers and farm dwellers in organizing themselves around alternatives, which challenge the current agricultural paradigm.
• Enhancing capacity for local agro-ecological production.
• Promoting joint systems of management, production, marketing up scaling of produce and access to and control over resources through agricultural co-operatives.
• Researching modalities for people’s land use, producing and marketing.  

SCLC utilizes popular education to:

• Deepen the debate around the root causes of skewed power relations and patterns of accumulation in order to strengthen mobilization
• Challenge skewed gender power relations and support women leadership
• Raise awareness around food sovereignty as an alternative to commercial agriculture
• Information dissemination around relevant legislation, which protects the rights of vulnerable workers
• Raise awareness around issues of climate change and alternatives to combat and adjust to the effects of climate change

Target Participants

SCLC works with excluded rural women, men and youth in the Southern Cape and Central Karoo and western regions of the Eastern Cape.  SCLC prioritises working with farm dwellers and workers.

Focus Areas

SCLC has the following programmes:

• Farm dweller programme
• Rural people’s livelihood
• Awareness raising and campaigns
• Alliance with civil society organizations
• Human and institutional development

Approach

SCLC includes popular education as one of the strategies in supporting mobilization for agrarian transformation amongst rural women and men. SCLC facilitates political education events and schools and develops information booklets, which are easily accessible to rural people.

SCLC’s approach to popular education draws on the tradition of the work of Paulo Freire and the Training for Transformation (TfT) approach. SCLC also draws on international struggles of the poor in the context of global capitalism through booklets such as ILRIG’s Globalisation series.

Tools and Processes

Examples of particular processes include:

• Political education schools towards building a critical mass
• Study circles to build critical leadership informed by study packages
• Peer exchanges and peer to peer learning
• Participatory action research

Example of a Resource:

Understanding of Popular Education

SCLC understands popular education to be ‘people-centred education’ where there is equal sharing of ideas and knowledge, as opposed to the ‘banking’ method of education. Popular education is based on and starts from people’s everyday realities and experiences. This is then linked to an understanding of oppressive systems and prejudices that dominate society.