The Grinding Issue: Introducing Our Official Newsletter - October 2021 Edition
Image Source: Here
Welcome to October! Hope you’re all in good health and spirits. This month we’re going to use the newsletter to highlight the state of SA education, given its central role in the formation of the Foundation. One of the foremost challenges the country faces is chronic lack of skills within its working age population. How is a modern country to operate and thrive without a well educated and skilled populous? Nigh impossible…
The aim of this letter is to simply give an introduction to the state of the education system, hopefully that context re-galvanises all of us members in the goals of the Foundation. With that, let’s get stuck in…
The state of education in SA must be seen in the wider context of one of the most unequal societies in the world – as well as the historical legacy of a deliberate strategy by the apartheid project, to deny Black South Africans meaningful and free access to quality education (a good summary on Bantu education can be found here). To give an idea, no new high schools were built in Soweto between 1962 and 1971 due to the government’s homelands policy (students were meant to move to their homelands to attend newly built schools there. All this while the population grew by at least 20% over that same period.
To compound matters, today, Black South African households earn on average less than 20% of White households – nearly half the black population is considered to be below the poverty line compared to less than 1% of the white community. [As an aside, it still baffles me why when I google “squatter camps in south Africa” the images’ page is incongruent with this statistic?!]. Thus many schools and the communities they serve continue to live with consequences of the political and economic decisions made during the apartheid era. The result is that a child’s experience of education in South Africa still very much depends on where they were born, how wealthy they are and the colour of their skin.
So it’s clear that in order to lift the quality of skills in South Africa, we need to greatly improve the educational outcomes of poor South Africans. A study, commissioned by the SA Presidency in 2016, aimed to identify the binding constraints to improved educational outcomes, found the following:
1. Weak institutional functioning
2. Undue union influence
3. Weak teacher content knowledge and pedagogical skill
4. Wasted learning time and insufficient opportunity to learn
The interactions of these factors leads us to suffer the following:
And the following:
Even more depressing, the teachers themselves don’t have the requisite proficiency in the subject they are teaching:
One of the things that have baffled me as an interested stakeholder in SA education is this statistic: SA has one of the highest rates of public investment in education in the world at 7% of GDP (20% of total state expenditure) and YET, public school teachers (qualified or otherwise) face woefully low salaries…?
As you trawl through some of the academic research into education in SA is that a necessary but insufficient condition to education reform is accountability. Accountability, as a capacity constraint, helps to explains why successive democratic cabinets have failed in addressing education. For those who suffer insomnia, I found this quite interesting in framing what seems like a problem too big to contemplate: Accountability and Capacity.
This brief introduction to some of the systemic challenges facing poor South Africans suggests to me that we can and should make a small difference in our own immediate lives. The scale of the problem is such that it cannot be left to one stakeholder alone to resolve. It is for this reason that we call on the Grind Foundation and its members to contribute money and/or their time to chip away at this challenge facing many South Africans. It is through our continued small efforts that we as the Foundation will be able to collectively create a powerfully compounding difference in our country.
P.S. Nic Spaull has a mountain of info, research and textbooks on the subject if you’re interested in reading further, just head here: https://nicspaull.com/research/).
Project Update
No new projects to report. However, as we look into 2022 and become a bit more emboldened by the successes of projects undertaken in 2020/2021, there is a need for us to give our funding a step change. This will hopefully result in more engagement by the Foundation with members, potential funders and other stakeholders in 2022 and beyond.
As if any of us needed any inspiration, the FLY tablet project (photos here) was a roaring success and we hope to repeat this success in a significantly bigger way next year…
As always, please send any fundraising ideas you have to the Projects team for consideration and potential support.
We continue to call out to all members to shadow the various portfolios and join subcommittees for projects.
COVID Update
We are now on alert level 1 (here for those of you who might’ve slept through the last few days) in SA. Hope you’re enjoying it (in an obviously COVID-safe way). So far, SA is running behind its vaccination target of 300k jabs per day but the trend is your friend and it’s starting to look like we’ll be there by mid October.
Where we stand with South Africa’s vaccination drive: As of 13 October 2021, the total number of vaccines administered to adults South Africans was 19,461,202:
So we’ve got just over 10.2m (25.5% adults) fully vaccinated adults, up from 6.6m (16.5% adults) a month ago. We’ve now 9.2m partially vaccinated (23.02%). This is good news and suggests the pace of vaccinations held up well over the last month (figure below) and are now averaging ~200k jabs per day since 1 st October. For context, government’s initial target was to vaccinate 67% of the population, which is ~40m people – we about halfway there (partial + full jabs).
As always, all the info you need is right here.
Finally, the digital COVID vaccination certificates are imminent (press release) but the system isn’t quite ready. Despair not those of who with Discovery, you can download yours via their Discovery app (login here).
So we still need to mask up, wash our hands and stay socially distanced to keep ourselves safe. And most importantly, get our heads around vaccinating and get vaxxed at the earliest possible opportunity.
I’ve pasted some resources below for those who have questions or would like to share with family or friends who are hesitant:
https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/covid19-5-reasons-you-should-have-the-vaccination
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019ncov/vaccines/vaccine-benefits.html
Upcoming Events
11 December 2021 – Year-End Partytjie, Venue TBC