Background: Globally, people often migrate from rural to urban areas in search of employment. Lack of adequate employment opportunities in cities forced individuals to engage in slum informal economic activities out of necessity.Aim: The informal sector presently employed about 86% of labour in Ghana, contributing 42% to its gross domestic product (GDP). Various constraints held back the development of slum informal activities. Formalising the informal sector is advocated as a step to generate employment. This article investigated the dynamics of informal sector activities and formalisation among slum operators in Ghana, based on a survey in two major cities there.Setting: This article investigated the constraints that hinder the development of slum activities in Accra and Kumasi, two cities in Ghana, and examined the informal operators’ subjective well-being and their willingness to graduate to the formal sector, should the constraints be addressed.Methods: Data were collected by means of a questionnaire, administered to a random sample of 342 informal slum operators. Enterprise constraints are examined by using the principal component analysis (PCA) method and the likelihood of the informal operators’ graduating to the formal sector by using logistic regression.Results: The PCA identified six clusters as limitations, explaining about 77% of the variation in constraints. These related to a lack of business knowledge, credit access, tools and materials, security and social networking. The logistic regression results reflect that, of all the constraints, it is only when access to capital is addressed, that slum operators will move into formal activities.Conclusion: When people are happy in what they are doing, they are reluctant to move to the formal sector, despite incentives or interventions that address their enterprise constraints. Hence, slum operators and informal activities are unlikely to disappear. Nevertheless, policy-makers have to devise appropriate financing strategies for slum operators to help in their formalisation and growth pathways.
South African state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been underperforming for the past decade riddled with poor service delivery, employee retrenchments, lack of employee motivation and inability to embrace innovative approaches in management of business. There has been a call from the South African government for SOEs to self-renew and become effective in service delivery. As a result the role of human resource management (HRM) assist organisations to become effective through the use of innovative human resource practices. This paper is an investigation carried out at a selected South African SOE to determine the effectiveness of HRM in creating organisational competitiveness. A qualitative research approach was adopted where interviews were used to gather data from the company’s human resource practitioners and departmental heads. Non-probability sampling was used and 24 participants were purposively selected. The study revealed that HR practitioners do not participate in policy reviews whereas their skills are underutilised, they lack latest technology and it was noted that there is excessive control from high authorities.
Received: 11 February 2021 / Accepted: 16 March 2021 / Published: 17 May 2021
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.