Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The Joint Enrichment Project (JEP) was a non-government organization (NGO) prominent in South African youth development from 1986-2008, one of many institutions that played a key role in bringing South Africa out of apartheid and into the global economy in the 1990s. NGOs that attempted to partner with the new government after the 1994 transition to democracy faced many challenges, including a new ‘bureaucracy’ of development that eventually led to JEP’s closure. Some researchers have been critical of development NGOs like JEP, arguing that they contribute only marginally to socio-economic change because they are generally unable to scale up their programs. While on the surface JEP’s story might confirm this criticism, its hidden institutional history challenges it. As development theorists have urged, to fully understand the effectiveness of an NGO, both its intended and unintended impacts must be considered. But exactly how an institution’s influence is spread, its impact on socio-economic change, and its impact on individual lives over time typically remain hidden. Drawing on over 20 years of research (grounded in methods of history, ethnography, and applied linguistics), this paper explores those impacts. Including the life trajectories of JEP’s constituents (directors, staff, participants) as a critical part of the institution’s history reveals a concrete, intimate version of a bigger societal story: decades of anti-apartheid struggle, transition to democracy, subsequent socio-economic changes, and socio-economic reproduction. Considering the NGO as a prism puts this bigger story into human terms, refracting ‘layers’ of socio-economic change and reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa.