Purpose: This paper seeks to explore varied interrelated challenges and barriers experienced by immigrant seniors.Design/methodology/approach: Senior immigrants representing diverse ethnicities (Chinese, Afro Caribbean, Former Yugoslavian, Spanish) described their challenges, support needs, and barriers to service access. Service providers and policy makers from organizations serving immigrant seniors were interviewed to elicit their views on barriers to access and appropriateness of services for immigrant seniors. Qualitative methods were employed to enhance understanding of meanings, perceptions, beliefs, values, and behaviors of immigrant seniors, and investigate sensitive issues experienced by vulnerable groups. The qualitative data were subjected to thematic content analysis.Findings: Seniors reported financial and language difficulties, health problems, discrimination, family conflicts, and social isolation. Although most immigrant seniors appreciated the standard of living in Canada and the services provided to seniors, most believed that support received was inadequate. Seniors encountered systemic (e.g. government policies), institutional (e.g. culturally inappropriate programs), and personal (e.g. transportation, language problems) barriers to accessing social and health services. Service providers and policy makers faced high costs of programs, inadequate financial and human resources, inadequate information about needs of immigrant seniors, inadequate geographical coverage, and lack of inter‐sectoral collaboration.Practical implications: The challenges experienced by immigrant seniors have implications for programs and policies and can inform the development of culturally sensitive and appropriate services.Social implications: The barriers encountered by service providers in assisting immigrant seniors point to the importance of inter‐sectoral coordination, cultural sensitivity training, and expansion of service providers' mandates.Originality/value: This study revealed numerous unmet needs for successful acculturation of immigrant and refugee seniors in Canada. It also reveals that the most cogent and sustainable approach to close this chasm of support deficits, unattended challenges, and complex stressors is to implement a model that simultaneously addresses the three levels and use a multisectoral approach.

The level of educational attainment is increasingly being recognized as an important social determinant of health. While higher educational attainment can play a significant role in shaping employment opportunities, it can also increase the capacity for better decision making regarding one’s health, and provide scope for increasing social and personal resources that are vital for physical and mental health. In today’s highly globalized knowledge based society postsecondary education (PSE) is fast becoming a minimum requirement for securing employment that can afford young adults the economic, social and personal resources needed for better health. Canada ranks high among OECD countries in terms of advanced education, with 66% of Canadians having completed some form of postsecondary education. Yet youth from low income indigenous and visible minority (LIIVM) backgrounds continue to be poorly represented at PSE levels. The current study aimed to understand the reasons for this poor representation by examining the experiences of LIIVM students enrolled in a postsecondary program. Findings show that the challenges they faced during the course of their study had an adverse impact on their health and that improving representation of these students in PSE will require changes at many levels.

The overwhelming finding is that after more than a decade of democracy, the Eastern Cape (EC) province remains trapped in structural poverty. This shows in all aspects of its demographic, health and socio-economic profiles. Methods, measurements and statistics vary, but from the various studies and data sets one can attest that the majority of the population still lives in poverty. Despite the democratic transformation that began in South Africa in 1994, poverty, unemployment and inequality exist today along with the food insecurity that is symptomatic of them. Food insecurity in South Africa varies across its nine provinces, with the EC province frequently measured as the poorest province in the country. This article examines the extent to which the EC can be defined as vulnerable to food insecurity by using a review of current literature. These vulnerabilities are compounded by the environmental vulnerability factors of climate change and drought, which affect households’ ability to grow food. The elderly and children are affected by life cycle vulnerability factors, with children prone to malnutrition and the elderly unable to work to produce food. Race and gender are associated with vulnerability to food insecurity. Most of the people in the EC who are poor and are African, and a high percentage of women-headed households is poor. The vulnerability factors identified suggest that job creation and agricultural productivity may be useful ways of targeting food insecurity. Interventions need to take local contexts into account and focus on particular communities and their unique needs.

Community family planning programmes in South Africa arose from the controversial apartheid history of controlling the African population while encouraging the growth of European migrant population. Post-apartheid population policies shifted away from population control to aligning policies to the global agenda that placed emphasis on the link between population and development. The focus on population and development polices in post-apartheid South Africa is on social equality, justice and peace rather than controlling sections of the population. Given the shift, this paper interrogates the conceptions of contraceptive use among rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal. Our primary objective is to understand the dynamics surrounding access to and use of family planning services in peri-urban and rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal. Using focus group data, the findings of the study suggest that different social categories interact with the family planning programmes differently. How teenagers and married women perceive the value of family planning differs. Gender differences regarding the use of condoms are also evident. The paper attempts to grapple with the non-use of condoms despite the knowledge that these prevent pregnancy and provide protection from sexually-transmitted diseases. The contribution of this paper lies in its identification of socio-cultural factors and the political economy underlying the different attitudes towards contraceptive use in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

Immigrants to Canada are less likely to be physically active compared with non-immigrants, and the interrelations between personal and environmental factors that influence physical activity for immigrants are largely unexplored. The goal of this qualitative descriptive study was to understand how the experience of being new to Canada impacts opportunities and participation in physical activity. Two focus group interviews with immigrants to Canada were conducted. The first group (n=7) included multicultural health brokers. The second group (n=14) included English as a second language students. Qualitative content analysis was used to determine three themes consistent with the research question: transition to Canadian life, commitments and priorities, and accessibility. Discussion was framed using a social ecological model. Implications for practice and policy are suggested including enhanced community engagement, and organizational modifications. Overall, the development and implementation of physical activity policies and practices for newcomers to Canada should be centered on newcomers’ perspectives and experiences.