One thing must be said at the outset ahead of the publication of the latest South African Child Gauge: South African children are by no means out of the woods. Especially the country’s very youngest bear the brunt of severe inequality. There are major challenges ahead of them in terms of healthcare, education, unemployment and basic access to services.

But, say researchers at the Children’s Institute in Cape Town, there have also been significant gains over the last ten years. In a nutshell:

• Child poverty has dropped from 74% in 2003 to 54% in 2013, driven primarily by the expansion of the Child Support Grant, which now reaches just under 12 million children;
• Children’s access to formal housing has increased to 75%, with access to basic sanitation at 72%;
• Deaths of children under five years old have fallen, following the rollout of the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission programme [HIV/Aids prevention];
• Access to early childhood development programmes has increased significantly since 2002;
• Access to basic education is nearly universal, at 98%.

The South African Child Gauge provides an annual snapshot of the country’s children; that is, all those under the age of 18. This year it will focus on social assistance. The news is mixed: there have been substantial gains, but difficulties come in when a more nuanced picture is painted, for example in examining the quality of the education accessed. Poor quality schooling, the researchers point out, acts as a poverty trap, starting in the foundation phase and culminating in high levels of high-school dropout.

South Africa still battles unacceptably high levels of violence against children. The child homicide rate is more than double the global average, and most forms of violence are perpetrated by someone known to the child. Nearly half of child homicides take place in the context of child abuse and neglect, and of these, 75% are children under the age of five.

Nonetheless, more progressive policies are ensuring slow gains, if slowly. Shanaaz Matthews, Director of the Children’s Institute, said it was “imperative” to “find innovative ways to protect children from violence and to build children’s resilience so they are able to recover from negative experiences.”

In addition, she said, it was vital to “continue to monitor the status of children, identifying critical gaps and opportunities to strengthen policy and programmes.” Although the Constitution protected children’s rights, children continued to experience high levels of violence across multiple settings, she added.

Some studies have turned up intriguing results in recent years. South Africa, for example, performed relatively well in the Early Childhood Wellbeing in Africa report, which found a correlation between child wellbeing and, among other things, mothers’ rights to education. In countries where there was greater equality between genders, children tended to be healthier and happier. The 2013 African Report on Child Wellbeing ranked 52 African governments in order of “child-friendliness”, and the countries that scored highest were Mauritius, South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Cape Verde, Rwanda, Lesotho, Algeria, Swaziland and Morocco.

Children themselves have their own ideas about their lives. The 2015 Children’s Worlds report focused specifically on an analysis of children’s subjective perceptions of their circumstances and surroundings. “The study aims to collect solid and representative data on children’s lives and daily activities and on their perceptions and evaluations of their lives,” the authors wrote. “[W]e wished to focus on children as social actors. Many social surveys gather statistics on children primarily as members of families or households. A drawback of this approach is that children’s status becomes defined by their household or family status and this may not reflect their personal experience.

“For example, a household may be defined as ‘not in poverty’ on the basis of household income, but a child in that household may still experience material deprivation depending on the spending choices that adults in the household make.” Educational crises or not, Children’s Worlds found that children in European countries tended to report higher levels of satisfaction with their friendships, while children in African countries tended to be happier in their school lives.

“One of [South Africa’s] big successes is the expansion of social grants, in particular the child support grant,” says Katharine Hall, senior researcher at the Children’s Institute. “Ten years ago, five million children were receiving the CSG, and it was only available to children up to the age of fourteen. Now it is available to all children – children being constitutionally defined as under 18 – and reaches nearly 12 million every month.”

Although a potential difficulty lies in the sustainability of grants, Hall says the outcomes to date have been positive. “The effects of the grant have been shown in multiple studies, and are widely known: children who receive grants, or even those who live in households where others receive grants, have better health and nutritional outcomes when controlling for other variables, and they do better at school. Grants are also associated with less risky behaviour among teenagers.” Child poverty rates have dropped over the last decade, although they remain high, she says.

Another improvement for South Africa’s children lies in the decreasing number of orphans. In the 2000s, the number of maternally orphaned children climbed steadily, says Hall, reaching a high of 1.6 million in 2009. “This was almost entirely due to HIV-related maternal deaths and the failure to roll out an efficient ARV programme. Since 2009, maternal orphaning rates have dropped substantially – much faster than those predicted by the modelled estimates – and are now around the 2005 figures, at 1.2 million.” Orphaning rates are expected to continue falling, says Hall, thanks to recently-announced eligibility criteria for enrolment into HAART.

So what needs to change? The key challenge, as Mathews points out, is in ensuring child-friendly policies are enforced. The CI’s Children Count project has revealed that South African children are disproportionately affected by poverty and that one in five live in overcrowded households, with one in three having limited access to water and one in four living without basic sanitation. This gap between theory and practice remains too large, says Lori Lake, commissioning editor of the Child Gauge. “While the Constitution outlines children’s rights to dignity, equality, education, health care and a range of services, we know that the gap between rich and poor is widening, and that poor quality schooling acts as poverty trap,” she says.

Further, she adds, children’s access to services continues to lag behind that of adults, making them disproportionately vulnerable to inequality. “Many experience multiple deprivations that accumulate over time, creating long-lasting developmental setbacks – driving an intergenerational cycle of poverty, where children in former ‘homeland’ areas and informal settlements continue to experience the highest levels of deprivation.”

Hall agrees: child-friendly policies aren’t being implemented effectively enough. “Good policies don’t always translate to good services, and there’s a huge challenge to improve responsive services like the SAPS, social welfare and emergency healthcare.

“We don’t know exactly the number of children who are abused, neglected and killed, but we know that these numbers are unacceptably high. One study showed that 44% of all reported sexual offences in South Africa were against children.

“Our welfare services seem to be in disarray: they are under-capacitated in every way – not enough staff, not enough cars, offices without computers. The system is still largely paper-based, and this means that cases cannot be properly tracked or referred. The few social workers there are, are rushing around trying to deal with the foster care backlog, although this mainly involves orphaned children who are living quite safely with relatives. In the meantime, cases referred from SAPS are not followed up, and those are the really urgent ones – and only the tip of the iceberg as most cases of abuse don’t get reported at all.”

Education, Hall adds, is a “massive challenge”. “The school attendance rate is almost 100%, at least until the end of the compulsory schooling phase, but this incredible opportunity is lost when schools are under-resourced, teachers not properly qualified or frequently absent, and textbooks don’t arrive. Good quality education needs to start from the very earliest grades, before grade 1, and continue right through.” It will likely be a long time, Hall believes, before we start seeing “substantial shifts” in this area.

And if the Children’s Institute could change one thing, right now, to make a difference? Lake says the support network for early childhood needs to be much wider, as well as strengthening efforts to prevent and respond to child abuse and neglect which, she says, contributes to an intergenerational cycle of violence. Hall says introducing Vitamin A supplementation for every child is an additional quick, easy win and that points of contact at health facilities can be used to greater effect. For that matter, she adds, basic sanitation won’t go amiss either.

“Basic services were promised years ago: adequate water and sanitation for all households. They are both inextricably linked to children’s health, but about five million children don’t have adequate services at home,” she says. DM

Photo: Children play in Happy Valley, Cape Town, South Africa, 05 May 2016. Happy Valley in the greater Blue Downs area is one of the poorest communities on the Cape Flats an area dubbed the apartheid dumping ground. EPA/NIC BOTHMA