From precarious lives to precarious work: The dilemma facing refugees in Gauteng, South Africa

South Africa is home to a large number of refugees and asylum seekers from across the African continent. While South Africa promotes the concept of 'self-settling', one of the greatest challenges refugees face is securing a livelihood and accessing formal employment. The article presents some of the findings of a qualitative study researching the perceptions and experiences of female refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Zimbabwe with regard to their daily life experiences and survival strategies. In this article, specific attention is given to the factors that impede refugee women's access to formal employment and how these women respond in terms of identifying survival strategies, which in most cases propel them into the informal sector and precarious work. The findings are discussed in terms of three sets of factors that shed light on the ability or inability of the respondents to access employment or generate an income in South Africa. These are: opportunity structures in the host society; institutional responses to refugees; and human capital.