The Power of Education

While most of us are scurrying around either starting or finishing shopping for Christmas gifts, another part of the world is bracing itself for another difficult season.  School fees to begin the annual term in January are always a point of stress for nearly all Swazi families.

 

Swaziland is considering whether or not to continue the constitutionally mandated payments to primary school for all children.  For the past several years they have added one grade per year, beginning with grade 1.  2012 should bring us up to the school fees being provided through grade 4.  With the current financial crisis in Swaziland and the rumblings in parliament one wonders if this will happen.

 

Educating children is a fundamental step in addressing the poverty cycle.  More than that, 

this chart  demonstrates that educating children, especially girls, is a life saving proposition!  There is a direct correlation between education level of girls and their first experience of sex.  The further along they go in school, the more likely they will put off having sex.  And in a country with the highest HIV infection rate in the world this is in deed a life saving proposition!

 

Adventures Swaziland is working to raise school fees for this coming school year.  We’d love to help as many of the children as possible with some or all of their school fees.  If you want to learn more or are willing to help, visit our new web page.  You can also donate there as well.  Just be sure to write “school fees” in the notes field.  Education is our featured project right now.  It costs about $100 to put someone in grades 1-7 in school for a year.  Would love to have your help!

SWAZILAND:
Will social services continue?

MBABANE,
17 October 2011 (IRIN) – Swaziland’s parliamentarians are questioning the
purpose of a social safety net covering children, the elderly and the disabled.
One dismissed it as little more than a public relations exercise, but in the
teetering economy the recipients often depend on these small grants and
pensions for survival.

“Why do we continue with this assistance [to orphans and vulnerable
children, (OVC), pensions and school fees for primary school students]? It
seems as if we are trying to impress some people here,” said
parliamentarian Patrick Gamedze in the assembly on 13 October. His colleague,
Nichodemus Mashwama, also called for an end to government payments for primary
school students, although this is stipulated in the constitution.

Other MPs backed Mashwama’s call for a constitutional amendment to abolish
government payments aimed at achieving universal primary education. Some
questioned why MPs should be held accountable for school fees, old age and
disability pensions, and grants for OVC when government had no money to pay for
them.

Donor-dependent Swaziland has been plunged into a financial crisis since
receipts from the Southern Africa Customs Union dried up in the wake of the
global 2008 slowdown, but finance minister Majozi Sithole recently conceded
that government corruption cost the country nearly twice the annual
amount budgeted for social services.

King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, rules a landlocked
country between South Africa and Mozambique, where about 70 percent of the 1.1
million Swazis live on US$2 a day or less. It has the world’s highest HIV/AIDS
prevalence, with one in four people aged 15-49 infected with the disease.

Earlier in October the Acting Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs,
Magwagwa Gamedze, told the UN Working Group of the Universal Periodic Review of
Swaziland that government was fulfilling its constitutional obligation to pay
for primary school education in a roll-out programme that currently funds
children in grades one and two, and this would be expanded to accommodate all
students up to grade five by 2015.

A
US$350 million bailout package, put together by South Africa after
international finance institutions declined to lend unless the country
restructured its finances, is awaiting signature of the Memorandum of
Understanding to release the money.

The government has shown little interest in signing the memorandum, which lists
“confidence-building measures” towards democracy human rights and
fiscal reform, as well as the “overhaul of its budgetary systems”,
among the loan conditions.

The Times of Swaziland, the country’s only independent newspaper, pessimistically
noted that the South African loan was “as good as dead”.

The debate on the future of social services was prompted by submissions from
the Deputy Prime Minister, Themba Masuku, on the suspension of grants to the
elderly. “We do not know where we will get the money to pay elderly
grants,” he commented.

Partial payments
Most pensions were suspended in the first quarter of 2011. In June only
6,480 pensions were paid, while at least 40,000 pensioners without bank
accounts received nothing so that OVC grants could be paid instead. Masuku did
not respond to parliamentary questions as to when regular pension payments
would resume.

“The money is so little – only R600 (US$80) a month – that few of the
elderly can afford to pay the high service fees charged by banks for
accounts,” Amos Zwane, president of the Swaziland Old Age Society, told
IRIN.

No pensioner has received any money from government in three months

“Whether they have accounts or not, no pensioner
has received any money from government in three months,” Zwane said.
“We go to the collection points, but there is nothing. There is no
explanation.”

Sharon Dlamini, who lives in Ewandle in the central Manzini region, told IRIN
“I ride the bus one hour to collect my pension and there is nothing for
me. My grandchildren suffer. It has been so long since I ever used that money
for myself, because I need it to pay their school fees and all their
needs.”

The 65-year-old widow said, “They are suffering now. I live in rags and I
go hungry, but I was happy to help them because those children have no one in
the world but their granny. But there are no grants for us any more.”