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COVID-19's outbreak in China at the end of 2019 and its expansion to South Africa have had a detrimental socioeconomic impact on Zimbabwean migrants and refugees in South Africa and immigrants and refugees are the hardest hit during the pandemic. The South African government's lockdown measures resulted in the shutdown of non-essential industries such as travel and tourism, construction, and e-hailing services, where most Zimbabwean migrants and refugees work as frontline workers. Some individuals are employed by shady businesses that can't afford to pay them during downtime. Others ran unregistered enterprises that were denied access to business relief packages due to technicalities. Furthermore, only a small percentage of the estimated 2 million Zimbabwean immigrants and refugees are documented to meet the access requirements for the aid packages. The government's ostensibly all-encompassing COVID-19 relief package requirements were as disparate as they were on paper. Negative nationalism, which sparked xenophobic attacks in 2008, 2015, and 2019, appears to underpin the government's foreign policy framework and attitude. According to the findings, the lockdown resulted in the loss of work, abject poverty, and broken marriages among Zimbabwean immigrants. To live, many turned to prostitution, drug dealing, and rampant opportunism.

Mandatory Audit Firm Rotation (MAFR), set to be implemented in South African from 1 April 2023, is poised by its propellers the world over as an essential reform in the efforts to improve auditor independence. Available literature suggests that there is no consensus regarding the impact of the implementation of MAFR. The divergent views on MAFR were demonstrated in recent time, with the European Union (EU) choosing to adopt it, while regulators in the United States decided to reject it. This paper examines the perspective of university auditing students on MAFR by examining the perceived impact it could have on auditor independence. The study finds that the majority (from 413 participants) of students surveyed are of the view that MAFR would yield positive outcomes on independence. The majority, however, agree on the MAFR Independence Benefit but warn about the possible negative consequences. MAFR will strengthen the independence of auditors.

Employers are increasingly expressing concern that the majority of recent graduates lack professional skills. In addition, it is unknown whether students pursuing accounting degrees in professionally accredited institutions are more financially savvy than those in non-accredited institutions. 1582 undergraduate accounting students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT), and Durban University of Technology (DUT) were surveyed using self-administered questionnaires. The data was analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 25 (SPSS 25). The results indicated that the majority of respondents were female. 72.6 percent of respondents are influenced by South African Institute of Charted Accountants (SAICA) accreditation, whereas 95.2 percent of respondents with outstanding professional skills are influenced by non-SAICA accreditation. The study's findings disprove previous claims that accreditation has no bearing on students' abilities. Finally, the investigation contributes South Africa-relevant knowledge..

Motivated by lack of empirical research on entrepreneurial knowledge training among adolescent girls and young women in South Africa and elsewhere, this article examined the entrepreneurial knowledge among 3584 adolescent girls and young women from four provinces, namely KwaZulu Natal, Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Western Cape in South Africa. This study adopted quantitative and descriptive research approach. Secondary data collected using questionnaire survey during entrepreneurial mindset and skills training from July-October 2021 by the large anonymised not for profit organisation based in South Africa was used for data analysis. Robustness analysis was entirely performed using descriptive statistics using SPSS version 28.0. The findings from the empirical part of this research statistically proved the adolescent girls and young women improved their knowledge entrepreneurially after training that is evident in most extent literature. This article contributes to the current body of knowledge as it filled in the gap and contributed significantly to the entrepreneurial mindset skill and knowledge improvement among adolescent girls and young women in South Africa.

Using a quantitative research method, this article examined the perceptions of audit experts concerning the influence of mandatory audit firm rotation on audit reform (AR) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Data was gathered from 102 audit experts knowledgeable in the field of accounting and auditing from Tier 2 audit firms and two public institutions and used for data analysis. The empirical results of this study were two-fold. Firstly, the descriptive statistics provided a general overview of the respondents' opinions. The majority of respondents agreed that MAFR implementation would strengthen audit reform, thereby validating the initial position of the Independent Regulatory Board of Auditors. In addition, most participants agreed that the ramification of the imposition of additional costs could not be ignored. Moreover, the utilization of SPSS on ordinal logistic regression also found that the probability of a decrease in the progress of audit reforms is significantly higher when mandatory audit firm rotation is in place, and a non-significant positive predictor of mandatory audit firm rotation would increase audit independence. This article contributes to existing knowledge and the continuous discourse on mandatory audit firm rotation rule in South Africa. Conclusively, the study, therefore, recommends that since the research was limited to Kwazulu-Natal, future studies should broadly include registered auditors and academics from institutions and firms in different South African provinces to obtain diverse views about pre-and post-implementation of the rule in 2023 to compare the effects of the policy on audit independence.

In South Africa, the devastating effects of the COVID-19 plague forced several corporates to resort to business rescue proceedings to guarantee the continuance of their operations. However, the low success rates associated with the current South African business rescue regime are a thing of concern among policymakers. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review highlighting the shortcomings of the current South African business rescue mechanism and recommendations that can be adopted to improve its success rates. The study then proposes a broad agenda for future research. We discover that even though the South African business rescue mechanism is an economically significant, promising framework that gives companies time and space to find solutions for their problems, it is associated with numerous shortcomings that lessen its success rates. Also, the study results indicate that the regime can be improved in more than a few dimensions to augment its success rates. Further, the review divulges that implementing the current South African business rescue framework has some uncharted areas that need to be investigated. As a recommendation, policymakers should improve the business rescue regime to increase its success rates.