South Africa is among 15 countries which will share challenges facing the implementation of children’s rights online. This is to ensure children’s rights in schools are protected.
Corporal punishment, violence in schools and South Africa’s high school dropout rate are of the challenges schools face.
Educators will be able to access the website to learn how other countries are coping.
“It makes a lot of knowledge and experience available for a broad public. All South African teachers, all staff at school, principal can learn from what is being done in South African schools and in schools all over the world on implementation of children’s rights. How to make children’s rights real in their everyday lives,” says Sweden Lund University’s Dr Bodil Rasmusson.
10% of learners at Rekgonne Primary School in Bloemfontein are orphans.
The online platform might just give them a life line.
“In the classes they don’t participate. They are reserved and the other thing is that they don’t have uniform. Others are hungry although we have nutrition programme but we request NGOs to come so that they can supplement this nutrition programme so that they can concentrate in the classrooms. So, this programme is going to assist me to advertise my school so that the NGO can come and assist,” says Principal Duke Mphatsoanyane.
Free State Education MEC Tate Makgoe says, “One of the biggest problems in South Africa is that children start Grade 1 with big numbers and by the time they reach Grade 12 almost half of those learners are gone and I think that this platform would actually help us to learn what other countries are doing so that learners can stay a little bit longer in school up to Grade 12.”
The provincial Education Department says it will train educators in problematic schools.
