World Children’s Day: government must be accountable for early childhood development rights

Today is World Children’s Day and activists in Cape Town and Pretoria aim to use the occasion to launch what they hope will become a major campaign to compel the government to make good its legal obligations and promises regarding the Early Childhood Development sector (ECD).

A rally is being held by the Centre for Early Childhood Development in the morning at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town while child rights groups in Gauteng plan a “sit-in” outside the Department of Basic Education in Pretoria.

The day marks a quarter-century since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It obliges states to allow children “to grow, learn, play, develop and flourish with dignity”.

Hailed as “the most ratified human rights treaty in history” all bar one of the 197 UN member states — the US — are formally committed to grant equal rights to all children. However, in the current state of global turmoil, with an estimated 44 armed conflicts under way around the world, this “most ratified treaty” is all too often observed in the breach. 

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Day by day, thousands of children are being butchered, beaten, maimed and starved while being socially and emotionally damaged. It is perhaps the most incredible waste of human potential in history. South Africa does not feature among the worst offenders. But, as activists point out, while there has been, in a still food-secure country, much official lip service paid locally to the goals of children’s rights, little has been done.

In 2016, the government produced a national integrated early childhood development policy that defined a raft of essential services for the well-being of young children. These included healthcare and support for primary caregivers at a time when the UN estimated that nearly one in three, or 1.7 million (27%) of South Africans under the age of five were stunted and more than six out of 10 (60%) of children in this age group suffered from anaemia. 

Four years later, before the Covid-19 pandemic, research done by the University of Cape Town’s annual Child Gauge found that the situation had worsened. This was at a time when other research had disclosed that nearly a million (“at least 974,000”) South African children under the age of six had no caregiver other than a working parent. When the pandemic struck the authorities reacted with a lockdown that included closing early childhood development and care centres. The situation, especially of the urban poor, deteriorated further. 

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Now, as the current official Early Childhood Review notes: “The incidence of severe acute malnutrition has risen, while stunting, which is the result of insufficient nutrition over an extended period, affects more than 1.5 million young children.” This has damaging effects physically, intellectually and often emotionally. 

Governments, having ratified the UN Convention, are not only morally, but legally obliged to make it a priority to stop this horrendous and effectively criminal neglect. Various studies have also shown that it makes not just social, but economic sense to make proper provision for children who are, after all, the future.

As the great abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass wrote: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

These are the messages the activists hope to drive home to the government today as they attempt to build mass support for the implementation of the government’s ECD obligations and promises. DM