Global Affairs: South Africa (wk #4)

In response to an article "From Harvard with love" By Msindisi Fengu, City Press, 30 April 2017.

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/from-harvard-with-love-20170430-2

Mfundo Radebe, from Umlazi township in KwaZulu-Natal, who is currently a student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A, has set up an initiative supplying textbooks to needy public schools across South Africa to give back to society. To do it, he’s partnered with other young people from affluent backgrounds in the country and with private donors to address the issue of lack of textbook resources for public schools. Wole Soyinka who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 in Literature, has endorsed the project.

And the National Youth Development Agency has described it as a contribution to social cohesion.

Radebe goes on to say how fortunate he was to have access to a school with available resources. He wrote letter upon letter to the board of ADvTech schools, which Crawford College falls under, asking for a sponsorship while he was a student at a Durban North public school which eventually got him a Crawford College bursary. While studying at Crawford College in La Lucia, Durban, he passed his matric with eight distinctions in 2015. Another scholarship was then awarded to him in 2016 to study political science and psychology at one of the eight Ivy League Universities of America, Harvard.

While visiting home after his first semester at Harvard, he found his textbooks and supplies packed away, and his friends said they also still had theirs. He then encouraged them to distribute them to less privileged schools.

“It feels like a deep personal commitment that I think we should all undertake,” he said.

Hoping to collect over 25 000 textbook resources a year in partnership with interested schools, he told City Press that his initiative would be piloted in Cape Town and Johannesburg firstly, and then rolled out in other schools.

His website promoting his Dlulisa Initiative is already up and running and speaking to City Press from the US this week, Radebe said this was his way of giving back to the community.

Radebe believes in focusing on the primary and secondary phase of school first when addressing education needs and issues. “No child should be left behind.” He said. “We need a systematic and radical change in the way we view education. A child with a textbook should be the most important goal that this nation strives for. It must come before political gain.”

“South Africa still has a long way before it can become an equal society.” He also stated, “This is important to me as somebody who has so much hope for South Africa and her people.”

I agree with Radebe. With over 15 million South Africans living in poverty, and numbers showing 80% of South African Schools not having enough textbooks for it’s students. (1) We have to start somewhere and we cannot realistically overhaul the entire education system at once. There is not the resources or the manpower to do so. So cutting the problem off at the source in my opinion is the best way to go about it instead of continually trying to play “catch-up” and using “bandaids/plasters” to fix the wounds, rather lets prevent the wounds from happening in the first place.

For details on how to contribute books, visit dlulisainitiative.org

1. http://www.peaceagency.org.za/other-partnerships/the-dlulisa-initiative