There is no national government feeding scheme for kids before they enter formal schooling.
- The Real Reform for Early Childhood Development campaign is calling for a national feeding scheme for kids before they start formal schooling.
- Nearly one in four South African kids under the age of five are stunted due to malnutrition.
- And yet there is no government feeding scheme for kids before they enter formal schooling.
Despite the National School Nutrition Programme, government is failing to address malnutrition in kids. More than one in four (27%) South African kids under the age of five are stunted (short for their age). And a recent South African Human Rights Commission report found 116 kids in the Eastern Cape had died of severe malnutrition in the course of a year.
The problem is that there is no national feeding scheme for kids before they enter formal schooling, says the Real Reform for Early Childhood Development campaign, which released a series of reports this month seeking to address the issue.
The current National School Nutrition Programme dash by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) is only for learners in primary and secondary school.
The department does acquire an Early Childhood Development subsidy. It is R17 per child per day, but only R6.80 of this is intended for nutrition.
The Real Reform report says this is not enough, and points to the World Bank which suggested increasing the total subsidy per child per day to R31. This “would translate to an increase from R6.80 to R12.40 per child per day for nutrition”, according to Real Reform.
Furthermore, only registered Early Learning Programmes (ELPs) are eligible for the subsidy, yet 41% of ELPs are not registered. This may well mean that ELPs serving kids who need the subsidy the most are not receiving it.
Tatiana Kazim, researcher for the Equal Education Law Centre who co-authored one of the reports, says the measures government has taken to address malnutrition in the country’s kids are inadequate.
The Real Reform campaign argues for the creation of a novel, separate nutrition programme solely for kids in Early Childhood Development programmes.
The National Treasury has allocated funding for a pilot programme. Tshepo Mantjé, a coordinator for Real Reform, says they wish their research will be considered in its implementation.
The DBE attended the campaign’s report launch in Johannesburg on 3 November.
“We are urging the Department of Basic Education to provide nutrition support to every eligible kids attending early learning programmes, regardless of their registration status,” said Mantjé.
Kazim says the programme needs to be “rolled out nationally as soon as possible”.
The campaign recommends the DBE also conduct training on its health nutrition guidelines, oversee and coordinate the region at national, provincial and municipal level, and manufacture nutrition support a legal requirement.
The three reports were written by representatives from Equal Education, South African Medical Research Council, Ilifa Labantwana, DG Murray Trust, UCT’s Centre for Law and Society, Finish More Foundation and Equal Education Law Centre.
Elijah Mhlanga, a media spokesperson for the DBE, did not respond to GroundUp’s requests for comment.
© 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and carry out not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We keep an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. Every analytics tools are solely on our servers. We enact not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We execute not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please finish not delete the invisible pixel.
Shwatson
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
ella of light
I cannot see a comment section underneath a page on MyZA that I really find benefit from – https://myza.co.za/sa-news-headlines/ – so wanted to post a thank you here under this article if you do not mind at all. Iff my thank you is not appropriate please do delete, I will not be offended.