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# South Africa is failing its children
- URL: https://www.adelesulcas.com/south-africa-is-failing-its-children-2/
- Published: 2025-03-17T13:23:42.000Z
- Updated: 2025-03-17T13:23:42.000Z
- Author: Adèle Sulcas
- Tags: #Migrated-1793712467887, #sqs, #Import 2026-11-03 13:27

#### Why can the world's most unequal country not figure out how to feed and protect its youngest citizens?

March 17, 2025 - Consider this: A government department – education – in an upper-middle income country, responsible for providing nutritious meals to more than 10 million schoolchildren country-wide, celebrates the “donation” by the world’s biggest fast-food brand of convertible desk-bags – heavily branded in the mainly-red and yellow logo of said brand – to a couple of primary schools in the Western Cape. The Minister of Education herself posts this on social media, gushing thanks to said corporation. Others laud the “donation” in an environment where government is incapable of providing even desks to the schools – not because of lack of funds, but because of utter inefficiency, and a fundamental disregard for the people they are elected to serve.

In the meantime, another government department – health – has been sitting for two years on draft legislation that attempts to improve the shockingly inadequate nutrition labelling on packaged foods, and also includes restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods to children, including in or near schools.

Neither department deigns to respond to a journalist writing a feature article trying to dissect this contradiction. Thousands of social media onlookers rant about government’s turning children into “billboards”. Not many actually talk about the dire health impacts – in a country battling obesity, other forms of malnutrition, and a crippling non-communicable disease epidemic that includes ever-rising rates of diabetes, which is the country’s second-biggest killer (after tuberculosis), affects 12% of the adult population, and costs the public health system R2.7-billion per year in treatment. (The annual cost would rise to R21-billion of all cases were diagnosed and treated.)

It’s a perennial battle for a journalist (or for me, at least) to quell personal opinions when writing about various forms of injustice. As a South African, I find this especially tricky when I’m on home turf, and reporting on various food-systems and health-related regulatory matters. I am finding it increasingly difficult to suppress my unstoppable wish to vent about various forms of government negligence, inaction, lack of accountability, and its failure to fulfil its obligations to its people – a people who, for most of the past 30 years since democracy dawned, have been let down again, and again, and again.

The particular let-downs I’m most concerned with, given my current (sort of) day job as a writer for the Daily Maverick’s Food Justice project – an aspirational title for a multi-year project that sadly reports mostly on food *in*justice – are those relating to South Africa’s hunger and other-forms-of-malnutrition crisis, which manifests – as many of you by now may know – in widespread hunger, alongside widespread overweight and obesity (often in the presence of undernutrition at a micronutrient level), as well as higher-than-ever levels of stunting – currently at 29%, almost one third of all children. (Globally, the rate of stunting rate has dropped by 18% since the 1990s).

Child stunting is associated with lower educational achievement and reduced productivity in adulthood, as well as with higher rates of illness and death, and shorter height in adulthood. “Child growth patterns are therefore strong predictors of future human capital and social progress and of the health of future generations,” [wrote Carlos Monteiro](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20431795/?ref=adelesulcas.com), Professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the University of Sao Paolo (who also happens to be the brains behind the 2009 Nova classification system that first codified ultra-processed food) in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

This all occurs in a socio-economic environment (ie. [the world’s most unequal country](https://wid.world/news-article/10-facts-on-global-inequality-in-2024/?ref=adelesulcas.com#:~:text=In%20some%20countries%2C%20inequality%20has,growth%20has%20rebounded%20post%2Dcovid): South Africa) and variously dire food environments (ie. townships with little infrastructure and shops selling fast-street food and snacks but rarely nutritious fresh produce that is affordable) that make access to healthy food nigh impossible for millions of people – the people most in need of healthy nutrition, ie. the poor, the otherwise vulnerable, and especially the 13 million children (of the country’s 20 million) under 18 who are recipients of the national Social Security Agency’s child support grant.

Almost one quarter of children - [23%, Unicef says – live in “severe child food poverty”](https://www.unicef.org/southafrica/press-releases/23-cent-children-south-africa-live-severe-child-food-poverty?ref=adelesulcas.com) and are up to 50% more likely to suffer from life-threatening malnutrition.

Between 2014 and 2018, the proportion of children receiving this grant (currently all of R530 per month per child, or US$29) rose from 61.3% to 68.2%. Even taking just this uptick in social support and the insanity of almost one third of South Africa’s children being stunted into account – apart from a host of other ills – it seems clear that the government that (ahem) led this country for the past 30 years is evidently not succeeding in developing healthy, thriving young citizens who are developmentally capable of growing into the future human capital this country needs to raise itself out of the current quagmire of [45% unemployment among people aged 15 to 34](https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=17266&ref=adelesulcas.com), “lack of service delivery,” failing health and education systems, endemic corruption, and tens of millions of dashed hopes.

I have nattered on for quite a long time to set the context – but my real beef is this: Government departments seem intent on writing lots of policy, not consulting with other government departments about the overlaps, contradictions, or cross-sectoral synergies between and among policies, and above all, an overarching apparent total lack of concern to ensure that South African citizens – who are actually their bosses, not the other way around – are best served by policies that are tethered to reality, and that speak to people where they are.

The McDonald’s incident may seem to some to be minor but it speaks volumes about what is – and is not – happening in this country. Policy wonks talk about the necessity for “joined-up policy”, ie. policies that fit together, that work together, that are thought through as parts of a systems approach to solving a problem – the opposite of the tired, ineffective, stale silo-ed approaches still sadly dominating South African government and showing up South Africa’s tragic ineptitude in addressing the country’s deepening hunger and malnutrition crises.