While some developing African countries, such as Lesotho, have successfully established and nurtured collaborations between the state and civil society to protect orphans and vulnerable children, similar collaborations in South Africa remain unstructured.
Early childhood development requires child-oriented stakeholders to be involved from kindergarten to high school graduation.
This means that from the day a child is born they need to have the resources and guidance to develop holistically in and out of the home.
Stats SA data shows that South Africa has an increasing young population: 40% of our people are under the age of 15 and 37% are aged 15 to 24. Only 9% are older than 25 years.
Nearly 60% of South Africa’s children receive social grants and nearly 35% live in households where no one is employed, forcing them to subsist on those social grants.
There is no consensus on whether the current reality is sustainable over time.
More than 65% of South Africa’s children live in households with a per capita income of less than R650 a month.
Even by conservative estimates, the impact of unemployment is discouraging.
The report estimates that people go hungry in a fifth of households where nobody has work.
South Africa’s orphans and vulnerable children still face numerous other challenges and while the legal frameworks exist to protect the rights of a child, implementation has proved challenging.
When the Constitution was enacted for the first time in 1996, it marked the beginning of contractual obligations on the part of the state towards the rights of a child.
The high rate of orphaned and vulnerable children in South Africa has negative implications for the country’s desired economic growth rates, overall competitiveness and social cohesion.
A country’s greatest asset is its children. Investing in their needs is our societal collective responsibility.
How can society eliminate the dangers that orphans and vulnerable children face, and how can we build the foundation for our children to grow into competitive and productive members of society?
The answer lies in community building, collaboration and partnership.
Involving the community in finding solutions for the challenges that orphans and vulnerable children face is important, as are collaboration, willing mentorship and extended parental responsibility.
Breaking the cycle of poverty
And while the value of partnerships has been lauded through the years, for orphans and vulnerable children they are especially important.
Communities need to understand that abandoned children become everyone’s problem if they develop into social delinquents.
Part of fixing these challenges lies in strengthening our education system: Stats SA reckons that by age 22, nearly 60% of young people are neither working nor studying and many of them risk becoming unemployable.
This is tragic at a personal, human level, but also robs South Africa of its greatest competitive economic advantage: a generation of young, empowered, resourced entrepreneurs.
Corporate South Africa can and does have a critical role to play in partnership with both government and communities.
An example is the Old Mutual Foundation’s support of the LEAP Maths and Science Schools and the Old Mutual Education Trust.
These initiatives provide access to education to learners from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But they, and efforts like them, must be underpinned by ensuring that South Africans’ rights are met earlier to mitigate adverse effects of the current realities of our societal challenges.
In the case of the Old Mutual Foundation, about R85-million a year is allocated specifically to improving our education performance, while additional resources are committed to skills capacity building and enterprise development.
These efforts are complemented by one of the country’s largest staff volunteerism efforts, in which more than 35% of employees are involved in community development projects in their immediate environments.
But changing the destiny of young South Africans requires effort at all levels of society.
Primarily, communities need to be active participants in addressing challenges of orphans and vulnerable children to save them from despair and its associated behaviours.
Such interventions would no doubt help break the cycle of HIV, and substance abuse.
It is never too late to teach a child to take care of others and it is never too late to teach a child the value of communion and partnerships.
But for these ideas to be practical, we need to play our respective roles in supporting early childhood development in a holistic, integrated and involved manner.
This article forms part of a supplement paid for by Nedbank and Old Mutual. Contents and photographs were supplied and signed off by Nedbank and Old Mutual