Feed our children and they will empower themselves

There is not much you can do with R3,000 if you usually spend R30,000 on a handbag overseas. However, it only costs R24.79 a day to provide nutritious food for a child for a day. Yes, Ms Gigabyte, you can feed 121 children nutritious food for a day with that R3,000. And 1,210 children a day with that R30,000 you would pay for another handbag.

According to the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity group, the average cost to feed a child a basic nutritious diet cost R743.90 in May 2021, while the child support grant is only R460, 21% below the food poverty line of R585 per capita.

The R460 grant will only last 18 days. Although this will not mean most children will eat nothing for the rest of the month, it shows that child nutrition is compromised from day one. Research has proven over and over again that children who do not eat nutritious food to help their development battle to cope at school.

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Most of them do not even complete school and drop out to perform low-paid jobs that pay little, starting a new loop of hunger and underdevelopment of children all over again.

It serves little purpose to put plasters on the problem when institutions want to empower underfed children later in life. They will not reach their full potential because their growth was stunted due to the lack of nutritious food. In short, they will forever stay behind.

According to the group, stark evidence shows that children are suffering from hunger and under-nutrition. The growth of approximately 30% of boy children and 25% of girl children under the age of five years is stunted.

This is not a problem that can be hidden. Government under-spending on children has long-term consequences for our education, health, social and economic outcomes, the group says. Under-spending on children’s care and nutrition means that any investment in education will not be effective because hungry children struggle to learn.

ALSO READ: No hope for poor children without nutritious food

Malnourished children also get sick more often, more severely and for longer, putting more pressure on public healthcare. Hungry children develop more slowly and never develop to the full potential they would have had if they had proper food to eat.

As the group says: “South Africa’s next generation of adults and workers will follow their parents into the inter-generational poverty trap that will handicap South Africa’s future economic growth.”

We have to realise that empowerment starts at conception, with a healthy mother who has enough nutritious food to eat and enough food for her child to ensure early childhood development. Our children cannot eat airlines. They cannot eat shiny cars. Or handbags. But they all know the taste of the weeds that grow where they live.