The Children's Institute is a leader in child policy research and advocacy in South Africa. Our activities focus on four areas that are critical to children's well-being: child rights, child poverty, child health services, and care in the context of HIV/AIDS. Our purpose is to provide evidence to assist policy-makers and practitioners to create policies, programmes and institutions that support the best interests of children in South Africa.
In South Africa, the policies and practices of apartheid prior to 1994 resulted in severe and widespread violation of children’s rights. Since the advent of democracy, the country has made remarkable progress in addressing the historical inequities of apartheid and their consequences for children’s survival, development and well-being. The Constitution and a battery of new laws and policies provide the enabling frameworks for children’s health, care, development and protection; public expenditures on health, education and social grants have increased dramatically; and a high 96% of school-aged children are enrolled in school.
Despite these marks of real progress, inequity persists. There were 18.3 million children in South Africa 2007 (latest available data). Approximately 12.3 million children live in households with an income of less than ZAR1,200. Seventy-five percent of the African child population in the country live in income poverty and experience the multiple deprivations of poverty. Although the proportion of children living in income-poor households appears to have decreased over the last five years, child poverty continues to be pervasive and the proportion of poor African children has remained constant. The effects of the worst global economic crisis since 1929 are beginning to adversely affect this glimmer of hope. Also, the development of policies and programmes for children is still not consistently based on a systematic evidential approach that fully reflects the principles of social justice underlying South Africa’s Constitution.
In the face of enduring poverty and its effects on children’s well-being, there is a clear need for the Institute to continue its work in research, informative communication and evidence-based policy development to improve conditions for children. To this extent, the mission of the Children’s Institute is to contribute to policies, laws and interventions that promote equality and realise the rights and improve the conditions of all children in South Africa through research, advocacy, education and technical support, from a cross-disciplinary base.
The Institute hosts the following projects within its research focal areas of child health, child rights, HIV/AIDS and child poverty:
South African Child Gauge is an annual publication that tracks and monitors changes in children's situation over time. It is the only of its kind in the country, presenting in jargon-free language the latest academic evidence (qualitative and quantitative) on the situation of South Africa’s children.
Children Count – Abantwana Babalulekile Project monitors the realisation of children’s socio-economic rights in South Africa by tracking child-centred, national data on basic demographics and care arrangements, as well as indicators on health, social assistance, education, housing and access to water, sanitation and electricity.
Evaluation Project records the story of the Institute’s involvement in policy-reform processes and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the advocacy methodology employed in each process. The lessons learnt from each evaluation inform the methodologies for new, similar projects and are captured in a case studies series and occasional papers, and shared with relevant target audiences.
Project 28 conducts legal research interpreting the full scope and content of children’s constitutional rights; provides training on children’s rights and technical support and rights analyses; and offers expert evidence for public interest litigation that has the potential to advance children’s rights.
Social Service Practitioners Advocacy Network Project supports a social services practitioners network to promote participation in the Social Service Professions Bill law-making process. This new Act could resolve the many human resource challenges that will hamper the implementation of three new laws that pertain directly to children, particularly the new Children's Act.
Child Rights Education for Professionals Project is aimed at training health care professionals on child rights to enable such professionals to protect the rights of children with whom they work, and to become advocates for children's rights related to health.
Caring Schools Project is aimed at facilitating an expanded role for schools as nodes of care and support to vulnerable children in the context of HIV/AIDS. It combines capacity building, development and research, and involves a number of large partner organisations who are implementing action research in different sites, drawing on project tools.
Growing up in a time of AIDS: Abaqophi basOkhayeni Abaqinile Children's Radio Project is a child-participatory project aimed at contributing to public awareness and appropriate responses to children in the context of poverty and HIV/AIDS. It aims to provide children with lifeskills as well as to enable their life stories and views to reach the public through the production of their own radio programmes. The project involves three other partner organisations.
Infants and HIV/AIDS in South Africa: The Fragility of Life Project documents the experiences of HIV-positive mothers and their infants to analyse what affects the possibilities for life in the infant’s first year of life in conditions of poverty and an HIV/AIDS pandemic. It will contribute to understanding how the government’s prevention of mother-to-child transmission programme operates in practice, and in particular how women make decisions with regard to PMTCT.
The Children’s Institute goal is to promote effective policies and interventions that address the needs and rights of children. In striving towards this goal, the main objectives are to:
• characterise the major challenges facing children in South Africa; • conduct policy research, analysis and commentary; • provide evidence-based information and technical assistance to all relevant role players in the policy-making process; • undertake training and teaching; • promote and impact on policy-making decisions that affect children’s well-being; • monitor and evaluate the impact of policy and child well-being; • disseminate information and research findings, in a user-sensitive form, to all interested, involved and affected role players.
During South Africa’s apartheid years, scant attention was paid to the rights and needs of all children in the country, which resulted in a sub-optimal state of child well-being. This situation was further compromised by inadequate and inequitable services and infrastructure.
Following the first democratic elections in 1994, the new government made a series of commitments to children that included:
• accepting the 1990 World Summit goals for the survival, protection and development of children; • adopting a 'first call' for children through recognising their needs as paramount throughout South Africa’s economic and social development policies and programmes; and • ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
These commitments were translated into a Framework for a National Programme of Action for Children in South Africa in 1996.
During the apartheid years, many of the University of Cape Town (UCT) departments concerned with academic and service programmes related to children were involved in direct interventions to alleviate the plight of children. Substantial research by UCT staff into the status and the factors affecting child well-being also contributed to the development of policies and plans to promote and ensure child well-being in post-apartheid South Africa. On the basis of its history in this field, UCT provided an ideal institutional base for harnessing and co-ordinating the efforts of different disciplines in support of child-focused actions. In 1998, UCT initiated a plan for exploring the potential for establishing a university-based Children’s Institute which could focus the academic contributions of different departments to address the needs and the rights of children in South Africa.
Against this background, the former vice chancellor of the University, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, supported and encouraged the planning and development of a blueprint for establishing a Children’s Institute. In line with its strategic goal of maximising interdisciplinary links and co-operation, UCT committed to forging links between departments through focusing on specific areas. Children’s studies were identified as an important focus for such interdisciplinary endeavour; hence a Children’s Institute would be a vital catalyst for further interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the time of establishing the Children’s Institute, several departments at UCT had established policy units to contribute to public policies for transforming South Africa. The University therefore had substantive experience in policy-related academic activities, and a record of success in this area. Within this context, the Children’s Institute was established in July 2001, with a generous start-up grant from Atlantic Philanthropies.
The Institute’s research results over the years have been generated by individual projects; a few are highlighted here:
Qualitative: A study to develop recommendations to support and inform an appropriate health, social services and education response to the needs of orphans and other vulnerable children (OVCs) in the context of HIV/AIDS concluded that:
a critical shift in conceptual thinking regarding orphanhood is required to avoid making sweeping assumptions about vulnerability as a result of the death of biological parents;
the impact of HIV/AIDS and orphanhood is compounded in contexts of poverty;
a multi-departmental, cross-tiered integrated response to OVCs is required by government and civil society;
improved health and social services human resource capacity is required.
A study that aimed to advance understanding of the complex patterning of residential care for children in South Africa, and how it relates to national policy and law and to international child welfare policy, highlighted that:
the child population in children’s homes in the study was not skewed towards large proportions of very young children, nor predominantly constituted by orphaned children;
knowledge about HIV/AIDS in residential care facilities was uneven and far from comprehensive, despite the high proportion of HIV-positive children in the homes;
the situation of residential care in SA is much more complex than acknowledged in policy discourse and debate;
registration requirements and practices work against community-based residential settings that provide important support to children.
A project that aimed to bring evidence to bear on the making and implementation of a new Children’s Act found that:
children’s right to social services extends from family support services to protection services as well as services for especially vulnerable children and children in need of care outside the family environment;
funding of non-profits needs to be reviewed in light of the new Act and human resource capacity should be increased and developed for all the service areas provided for in the Act;
the full range of social services practitioners needs to be recognised and developed;
a massive social services budget increase is needed to implement the new Act.
Qualitative & quantitative: A multi-year project combining policy review and primary research to investigate the way in which government targets poverty alleviations programmes related to a number of children’s socio-economic rights found that:
access to identity documents and government offices hampers children receiving social security grants;
poor children in their final years of schooling are made vulnerable by the age cut-off for a several programmes;
the lack of implementation of some poverty alleviation programmes is the result of systemic challenges;
barriers to health care are due to factors such as transport and shortage of medical staff and medicine.
Quantitative: Children Count – Abantwana Babalulekile Project monitors the realisation of children’s socio-economic rights in South Africa by tracking child-centred, national data. The findings are numerous and can be viewed on www.childrencount.ci.org.za
Evaluation The research and advocacy activities of the Children’s Institute are reviewed at the annual meetings of the International Board of Advisors and Governing Board. Furthermore, several project evaluations have taken place over the years – some qualitative (one-on-one interviews, focus groups and stakeholder workshops), some quantitative (survey on the South African Child Gauge). The methodology of and impact reflections from key stakeholders in a number of ‘Getting Research into Policy and Practice’ projects have been written up as case studies to inform improved future policy research and advocacy. Some findings and conclusions from one case study on three child health policy processes, in which the Institute played a leading role, are captured below.
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