Child Rights in South Africa

Has Government “Dropped The Baby”?

Norman Reynolds

The Minister of Social Development, Dr Zola Skweyiya, has told us many times that the child is in deep trouble in South Africa. The Early Childhood Development White Paper of 2001, estimated that 40% of all children “grow up in conditions of neglect and poverty”. The Law Commission puts it at 60% and ACCES believes that 70%, or some 17 million children, live on less than R144 pm. There are 11.8 million of the poorest 23.8 million South Africans – including many people living with HIV/AIDS – who live in households that receive no social grants. Today there are 300,000 AIDS orphans in South Africa. This will rise to 2 million by 2015. Each day 10 million children under 19 go hungry. There is often peer pressure to get involved in activities related to drugs and sex and, to complicate matters, the support of a functional extended family that has traditionally been a secure anchor in the lives of children is no longer guaranteed. Single parent families and even child-headed households are becoming alarmingly common. South Africa’s future is at stake if nothing is done to secure the well-being of all children.

Government has recently taken three decisions that all serve to further harm children. They act to rubbish constitutional obligations, run counter to accepted best practice with regard to public investment norms and deny stated policy objectives re children. They are: -

1. The decision to ignore the Basic Income Grant (BIG) means that there is no universal social security system in place. The BIG, if set, as proposed, at R100 per person per month, promises to lift all those in destitution into poverty and to lift two thirds of those in poverty out of poverty with the chance to exercise choices, to live with some degree of dignity and to contribute to local economic growth. An additional benefit of the BIG would be healthier, safer and less traumatised children able to attend and to be successful at school.

2. Instead of an income programme (the BIG), government has chosen to expand the Child Support Grant (R140 per month) to children under 14 years as an anti-poverty measure. This is bizarre policymaking, a confusion between ends and means. The grant was instituted to secure the Constitutional rights of children - shelter, nutrition, primary health care and social services. The take up rate has and remains low. Almost half of all children do not have birth certificates and means tests are costly and cumbersome. Worse, the grants go to child minders, which means they go to very poor households that naturally treat the payment as income – food for a week. What began as monies to secure the constitutional rights of the child has become, as a partial income grant, very modest income in the hands of some poor households – food for a week!

This confusion in policy making and programming is unacceptable. Neither securing children’s rights and welfare nor relieving household income poverty can be realised from confused, costly and ineffective half measures. Administration and the monthly transfer costs of grants into individual child-minder accounts are high – around 40% of the small value of the grant. It is a totally inadequate approach, an abuse of the crisis around children. It acts to avoid serious responses to both national crises: child rights and poverty.

3. The White Paper acknowledged that Early Childhood Development (0 to 9 years) represents the highest return possible to public investment, especially in the earlier years. Yet, government only commits education expenditure to a Reception Year for six year olds within primary schools in order to meet the ANC electoral promise of 10 years of free schooling. The result is the financial and professional collapse of community pre-schools:-
· This “preparatory” free school year has encouraged parents to keep children out of pre-school so that community pre-schools lose the fees of that “senior” year and of dwindling overall attendance.
· The relatively few trained community teachers either seek the far higher wages as Grade R teachers despite the fact that there is little security and the wage is less than that of other teachers or they leave the sector.
· The small children of most families and those in Grade R after school hours now no longer have community pre-schools to care for them.

This policy and investment nonsense acts to delay crucial public and family investment in children for five long and formative years whilst it destroys community mobilisation, action and responsibility!

The ECD sector is now trying a brave approach, the formation of “safety nets” for children. It is trying to establish a working relationship between communities-in-need and official service providers, that is between rights holders (the children) and duty bearers (government departments). The aim is to deliver efficiently all the resources and services intended for children. Enabled communities have to begin to act on behalf of their children, understand their rights and to be able to give effect to them so that all the children in the community are protected and nurtured by a net of services and resources. The sheer effort required to co-ordinate government departments use of budgets and staff gives this approach little chance of success.

The right and the ability to co-ordinate the services to children has to be placed where there is the greatest awareness of and interest in the “whole” needs of each and every child; that is with parents and community. How?

The first task is to separate out poverty programmes from programmes that secure the rights of children. If the BIG is never to happen, then another “income” programme must replace it. Some councils have now voted to run a Community Investment Programme that provides “investment grants” to all adults in registered Community Development Associations. This is a higher conception of financing and local mobilisation than the BIG. Grants have first to be invested in the local productive base. Wages and local payments provide additional local income. Within a few years, the returns to investments and from increased local economic activity will further raise general welfare considerably.

To secure all children requires a different approach. Deputy-President Jacob Zuma has provided an operationally useful slogan. He recently urged that the principle of "any child is my child" be revived in communities. Culturally and socially, this approach is the best way to tackle the crisis. It echoes the core of Ubuntu, of finding meaning through caring for each other. This injunction is echoed in the Constitution. It must be translated into the means for people to act jointly, to take responsibility, to transform society around them, to put into place the fundamental prerequisites to secure child rights.

The Child Support Grant must go. A universal Child Rights Grant provided to all children from 0 to at least 9 years can replace it. This model would allow the following to happen:-

1. Rather than being paid out to parents and child minders, the Child Rights grant is assembled at the level of street or block or sub-village as a Children’s Budget. In the spirit of Ubuntu, “All children are my children”, all adults accept responsibility for all children in each area. It is possible to add to the physical rights provided by the Constitution the child’s right to intellectual and moral growth and to good parenting.

2. Adults register all children without waiting for Home Affairs to catch up with birth certificates. They enjoy the right, the means and the responsibility to secure all children, to support all parents, to see that all children attend well-trained and supervised community-based playgroups and pre-schools and are cared for by the primary health system.

The responsibility of parents for children was reinforced by the Grootboom Judgement given by the Constitutional Court in 2000. It found that, “responsibility for the well-being of children is imposed primarily on the parents or family and only alternatively on the state.” A child rights culture and programme should reflect the administrative implications of the Constitution, notably Section 28 (2) which states that, “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child”. The imperative is that the state has to “get behind” parents and communities in whatever way enhances the child and ensures its overall development. This means that the state must stop eating the resources by supplying what it cannot deliver itself.

The state is on shaky constitutional and developmental grounds with regard to both children and poverty. The opportunity exists to back parents and adults, acting in community, as good parents and as local investors and economic agents. This is the best starting point for national and cultural renewal.