Report paints gloomy picture of SA’s youth

If children are the future of the country, the future is looking poor, illiterate, unskilled and abused – with high dropout and youth unemployment rates.

This is according to the State of the Child Report released yesterday by Deloitte and the Nelson Mandela Children Fund (NMCF) in time for the annual 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children – from 25 November to 10 December.

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Deloitte’s managing director of Businesses Joe Eshun reflected on one of Nelson Mandela’s comments about the legacy of the NMCF in which he said:

“As long as there are good men and good women, this organisation will continue.” Eshun said the NMCF, along with Girls & Boys Town and Deloitte, launched the State of the South African Child initiative in 2016 to develop and deploy interventions to effect real change for the children of South Africa.

The figures

He said the most recent report found 4 900 000 children were in need and lived below the poverty line, with an extremely high youth unemployment rate of 63.9%, which is 20% higher than in 2016 – and far higher than the national rate of 34.5%.

There was also a high unemployment rate of 32.6% for young graduates, while high school attendance indicated a significant drop – with 29% of 18 year olds and 46% of 19 year olds dropping out.

Eshun said the report was the first step in addressing challenges facing a child. “Eight in 10 South African children struggle to read by the age of 10 years old. That is scary.

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Child abuse seems to be increasing, there is an emergency and an urgent need to address that,” he said. The report centres around the NMCF’s priority areas and the challenges within these: child poverty; health and nutrition; education; housing and household characteristics; and child safety.

Eshun said the country’s future was the children we see being molested, and not having food or access to healthcare.

NMCF chief executive Dr Linda Ncube-Nkomo said the report was important to see where SA was as a country versus where the constitution says it should be.

Poverty the greatest challenge

“The biggest issue was poverty. Poverty affects children. “We are talking about children in households where the income for the month is between R380 and R670 for the entire household.”

Ncube-Nkomo said that put the child from that household on the back foot. “The odds from when this child is delivered are stacked against the child.”

She said the challenge was to make households economically active in a country like South Africa because some children were so hungry they couldn’t focus.

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“If you are hungry, you are not thinking about what you want to do with your life or which varsity you want to go to or what skills you need. You just think about where is my next meal,” she said.

Ncube-Nkomo added if SA could remove that layer of stress it had a better chance of building an educated and skilled young people.

Deloitte’s chief sustainability officer Ashleigh Theophanides said it was concerning that more than 50% live below the poverty line.

Family structures eroded

“We know that one-third of girls before the age of 18 years old have had some kind of abuse happen to them,” she said.

“Two-thirds of children who have access and are eligible for early childhood development can’t get access.” She said they had also seen an increase in orphans in South Africa and that 77% of orphan children were double orphan children.

“This means family structures are being eroded and the ability to support children is being challenged.” Theophanides said Covid had added challenges and had reduced their ability to address by more than four years.

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Lintel Community Awakening’s executive director Mpho Masienyane-Khauoe said a lot was happening but people didn’t have the mechanisms to report it. “

As a nation, we don’t know what is facing us. It is far more serious than we think.” She said she had worked with girls who say they’d rather die of HIV than of hunger.

“These are the kind of things we face in the communities,” she said.