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Swaziland: Urban Youth Slipping Through the Cracks
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
10 January 2008
Posted to the web 11 January 2008
James Hall
Mbabane
As the new school year begins here many destitute or orphaned children are in need of assistance to pay for their educations. An unknown number of urban youngsters, however, are slipping through the social welfare net.
"Impoverished children in the country's urban areas might run into the thousands," Juanita Mkhonta, a social welfare worker in the central commercial town Manzini, told IPS.
"It occurred to me during the Christmas holidays, when there were several news stories about urban orphans receiving food gift baskets," Mkhonta said. "I thought, if they were discovered by philanthropic individuals without the knowledge of the food aid organizations, how many of these uncounted kids are also lost to the school aid assistance system?"
"The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) did a crop assessment survey in May, and when the teams went from house to house we also did a survey of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children)," said Abdoulaye Balde, WFP Country Representative for Swaziland.
"The informal settlements at Swaziland's towns were left out of the survey because the populations were considered transitory," noted Mkhonta.
"There are no traditional authorities there or community committees for NGOs to work with. That is why there were so many poor children who received the food donations we read about in the press during the holidays. They said they had no food at home. My thought: If no one has made provisions for their meals, who is looking after their education?" she stressed.
"These kids have been lost in a societal change. Swaziland's government is geared toward traditional rural life. The U.N. agencies and NGOs are also primarily targeting rural areas for assistance. It's as if the towns do not exist," said Mkhonta.
The U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), for instance, works with traditional rural leaders to assist rural-based orphans and vulnerable children at schools and at neighbourhood care points.
"We really do not do town neighbourhood care points. The food aid we coordinate is primarily for rural schools," Pelucy Ntambirweki, a programme coordinator for UNICEF, told IPS.
The reason is a lack of data, which usually is only available in rural areas where persons in need can be reliably counted.
"Historically, Swazis reside under chiefs in rural areas. Towns are just places you go for jobs, and then the Swazi returns to the parental homestead when work is done," said Albert Dlamini, a 'runner', or clerk, for one of Swaziland's 350 hereditary chiefs.
Even Swazis who own homes in towns are considered subjects of rural chiefs, whose names are affixed to official documents like passports and tax forms.
"So, when people are counted it is at the chiefdoms," Dlamini told IPS.
UNICEF and other social welfare NGOS have enlisted chiefs to assess the number of children in need.
The National Emergency Task Force also employs community committees appointed by chiefs to tabulate orphans and people in need of emergency food assistance. Such committees locate child-headed households in their areas, which are proliferating as HIV/AIDS ravages families.
The data is then used to bring assistance to vulnerable children and place them back in classrooms they left when family finances made payment of school fees unaffordable, or parents died of AIDS, leaving children destitute.
"In rural areas, the children can be known. But in towns, who counts them in the township slums?" noted Dlamini.
Population information collection was extensive in 2007. Not only was last year the time for Swaziland's once a decade national census, but also the worst drought in modern history cut crop production by 80 percent, and a count of people requiring food assistance was necessary to avoid famine.
The health ministry also undertook its first household health survey in 2007 to determine an accurate picture of the country's AIDS situation. It found that more than a quarter of sexually active adults are HIV positive -- the world's highest prevalence rate.
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With AIDS deaths proliferating because of a slow rollout of anti-retroviral drugs, more children are destined to become orphans.
Swaziland's charitable organizations, be they faith-based or NGOs, open their doors to anyone in need, but tend to rely on recipients to come to them.
With data unavailable on the scope of children who may be left out of the education system when schools open this month, an informal survey was attempted by IPS. It is not hard to find informal settlements in Manzini, a small town of 30,000 that is Swaziland's largest urban centre because of such informal settlements, with populations that exceed 60,000.
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