There is a moment after every horrific act of violence against women when South Africa seems to stop. We grieve. We condemn. We ask how this could have happened. Social media fills with anger. Leaders promise action. Communities mourn. And then, slowly, life resumes. But for the families of the women whose lives have been taken, there is no returning to normal. The recent killings of women in Ekurhuleni in Gauteng have once again forced us to confront an unbearable reality.

On 20 September 2026, the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide said the bodies of nine women had been discovered in Ekurhuleni. The government subsequently announced an emergency strategy encompassing prevention and social cohesion, law enforcement and justice, and victim- and survivor-centred support. My most important question now is not simply whether we are outraged; it is what happens after the outrage. We cannot teach women to avoid violence forever. My problem is that for generations, the burden of personal safety has disproportionately been placed on women. We tell them to be careful; don’t walk alone, share your location, watch what you wear, watch your drink, and don’t stay out too late.

There may be practical reasons for exercising caution in an unsafe environment, but we must recognise the deeper injustice of a society in which women are continually required to reorganise their lives around the possibility of violence. Indeed, Parliament’s Oversight Committee on the Presidency has made this point precisely in responding to the Ekurhuleni killings: responsibility for safety cannot simply be shifted onto women by telling them to be more vigilant or restrict their movements. I believe we need to ask a different question. What are we teaching the people capable of perpetrating violence? That is where education becomes profoundly important.

Higher education must educate beyond the qualification

At GIFS, we believe education must ultimately contribute to the society we want to build. Institutions of higher learning prepare young people to become professionals, entrepreneurs and leaders. But education cannot only be about employability.

It must also be about humanity. A graduate may leave an institution knowing how to construct an argument, manage a business or lead a team. But what have we taught that graduate about dignity? Respect? Accountability? Power? Conflict? The equality of women? These cannot be conversations reserved for Women’s Month or the annual 16 Days of Activism campaign. They belong in the everyday culture of our institutions.

This also means bringing young men deliberately into the conversation. GBV cannot remain something discussed primarily by women, about what happens to women. Men must be participants in changing the attitudes, behaviours and social norms that allow violence against women to persist. The purpose is not to label young men as perpetrators. It is to recognise them as potentially powerful agents of change.

Media has a responsibility too

Another uncomfortable question is worth confronting. How do we tell these stories? We need to remember that behind every headline was a person. The government’s warning against circulating unverified allegations, graphic images, and victims’ personal information is particularly significant. Such sharing can further traumatise families, spread fear and potentially compromise investigations.

For emerging journalists, communicators, content creators and media practitioners, this presents an important ethical responsibility. Tell the story, certainly. I’m all for investigating failures, asking the difficult questions, and holding institutions accountable. However, we can never allow the pursuit of attention to erase human dignity. We should also resist allowing the frequency of these stories to make them ordinary. When another murdered woman becomes simply another headline, we have lost something important in ourselves.

Outrage is an emotion. Change is a commitment.

South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of outrage about GBV. What we need is the ability to turn outrage into sustained cultural change. Government has identified prevention and rebuilding social cohesion as part of its emergency response to the Ekurhuleni killings. That work cannot belong to government alone. It belongs in all our homes, in our communities, in lecture halls, student residences, workplaces and newsrooms. It belongs in conversations between friends when somebody makes a degrading remark, and everyone else laughs. And it belongs with those of us entrusted with educating the next generation.

Perhaps the measure of a successful education system should be not only the qualifications we award or the careers we help create. It should also be the kind of human beings we send into the world. The women we have lost deserve more than another moment of national outrage. They deserve a country determined to make sure fewer families ever have to experience that loss again. And that requires all of us to move beyond outrage. It requires us to change what comes next. And that change starts with each of us.

Dr Kershen Pillay, CEO of GIFS

©Higher Education News Services.

As South Africa approaches the 4 November Local Government Elections, growing frustration and disillusionment are shaping public sentiment.

Across the country, citizens are grappling with violent crime, mass shootings, unemployment, illegal immigration, rising living costs and ongoing fuel price increases.

For many households, daily survival has become increasingly difficult, leading voters to look to the ballot box hoping to change a political landscape they believe is failing to address their needs. Some, driven by desperation for change, are considering supporting racists, right-wing parties they may previously have rejected such as the FF+.

Public anger is evident in conversations taking place in communities, on social media, at taxi ranks and around family tables. Many South Africans are asking how the country reached its current state, why institutions tasked with serving and protecting citizens appear to be failing, and why political leaders seem unable or unwilling to confront the nation’s most urgent challenges.

A common view is that the ANC-led government has not delivered on the promises of democracy. Decades after the end of apartheid, millions remain unemployed, poverty is widespread and service delivery continues to deteriorate in many areas.

The formation of the GNU was presented as an opportunity to move beyond political divisions and focus on rebuilding the country. However, many believe that little has changed in practice.

Critics argue that the DA, as a key participant in the GNU, has not demonstrated sufficient commitment to addressing the concerns of the black majority. They point to conditions in Cape Town, citing persistent gang violence in the Cape Flats, housing shortages for the poor as evidence that the party has refused to address fundamental challenges where it governs. The question then is how effectively could it govern nationally?

Opposition movements that once inspired hope are also facing scrutiny. The EFF, which positioned itself as a champion of radical economic transformation and land redistribution, is increasingly being criticised for failing to advance meaningful land reform.

It seems to have done extremely well in its calls for the documentation of illegal migrants, but its campaign to return land to original owners has yielded little tangible progress.

There is also concern that calls by EFF CIC Julius Malema for people to grab vacant land have contributed to growing pressure on already overcrowded townships and informal settlements.

This has placed additional strain on infrastructure and public services in communities already struggling to meet residents’ needs. One could argue that if land redistribution is a sincere objective, efforts should focus on areas with greater available space rather than concentrating additional populations in crowded communities.

Many voters who hoped coalition politics or new leadership arrangements would produce a cleaner government and better outcomes are increasingly questioning whether any political parties within the GNU are willing to challenge the systems that contributed to the country’s current difficulties.

Concerns are heightened by recurring allegations of corruption and criminal conduct involving politicians and public officials. For citizens, such allegations reinforce the belief that some elected leaders are more focused on protecting themselves from accountability than acting in the public interest. This perception has fuelled growing cynicism about politics and public institutions.

At the heart of the public’s frustration is the belief that political elites have become detached from the realities facing ordinary South Africans. This disconnect has contributed to a significant erosion of trust in democratic institutions and political processes.

Adding to this mistrust is a growing perception that South Africa’s future is increasingly influenced by powerful external actors. Discussions about foreign funding, international organisations, multinational corporations, NGOs and migration have fuelled concerns that major decisions affecting the country are being shaped by interests beyond democratic oversight.

Whether these perceptions are accurate or not, they have become part of a broader narrative that South Africans are losing control over their own destiny.

The issue of illegal immigration has emerged as one of the most contentious topics in public debate in our recent history. Many South Africans believe the government has failed to secure borders effectively or adequately address the social and economic consequences associated with the influx of undocumented poor migrants.

Questions are frequently raised about whether there are undisclosed agendas influencing government policy and whether the public is receiving full transparency on the issue. The government has failed to engage openly and honestly with these concerns, allowing resentment and political polarisation to grow.

Frustration is also directed at institutions traditionally expected to serve as democratic watchdogs. Sections of the media, academia and civil society are increasingly accused of failing to hold those in power accountable.

These institutions have become too closely aligned with political and economic elites, limiting their willingness to challenge authority or amplify the concerns of ordinary South Africans.

The media, in particular, faces a crisis of credibility. Increasing numbers of people are turning away from traditional newspapers and broadcasters in favour of podcasts, independent platforms and alternative news sources.

This shift reflects a growing belief among some citizens that mainstream media outlets are not asking difficult questions with sufficient urgency or providing a platform for diverse perspectives.

Whether justified or not, this perception highlights a widening gap between institutions that shape public discourse and the communities they are intended to serve.

South Africa’s energy future is another source of uncertainty and questions continue to be raised about Eskom, renewable energy projects and the role of coal-powered stations in the country’s economy.

It seems energy policy is increasingly influenced by ideological considerations and external pressures rather than practical realities. While the government maintains that the transition towards alternative energy sources is necessary and responsible, many fear they are bearing the costs through higher prices, economic instability and ongoing uncertainty.

These concerns contribute to a broader feeling that the social contract between citizens and the state is under strain. Communities increasingly feel abandoned, vulnerable to crime and neglected by leaders who appear more focused on political survival than public service.

Yet the greatest threat facing the country may not be corruption, poor governance or economic decline alone. It is the possibility of public apathy. A society that loses faith in its ability to demand accountability risks surrendering its future to those who benefit from the status quo.

When voters stop believing they can influence political outcomes, democratic participation weakens and the prospects for meaningful reform diminish.

This reality makes civic engagement more important than ever. South Africans cannot afford to retreat into cynicism or hopelessness. Nor can they rely solely on politicians to solve the country’s challenges.

Our history demonstrates that significant change often comes from organised communities willing to mobilise, participate and demand accountability from those in power.

Meaningful progress requires more than simply replacing one political elite with another. It depends on active citizenry, democratic participation and sustained public pressure.

Peaceful protest, mass mobilisation, civic activism and continuous scrutiny of public officials remain essential tools for safeguarding democracy.

Communities must insist that public office exists to serve the people rather than enrich political insiders.

Equally important is the belief that the country’s future cannot be left entirely in the hands of politicians, courts, foreign interests or foreign-funded organisations.

The coming elections are significant, but voting alone will not resolve South Africa’s challenges. Democracy is not limited to occasional participation at the ballot box. It requires ongoing involvement from citizens who are prepared to question authority, demand answers and advocate for the interests of future generations.

South Africa stands at a crucial crossroads. One path may lead to deeper disillusionment, instability and decline. The other requires courage, unity and sustained public action.

Ultimately, the future of the country depends not only on political parties but on the willingness of ordinary citizens to transform their frustration into a determined and uncompromising demand for accountability, responsibility and meaningful change.

Zingisa Mkhuma is Editor - ednews.africa

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Assisting an entrenched homeless person to move back into society requires wraparound services, including a place to live, personal support, protected work, job training, health interventions and supported access to rehabilitation services.

This was the view of Dr Donald Skinner of the Division of Health Systems and Public Health in an opinion piece for the Weekend Argus to mark World Homeless Day on 10 October.

World Homeless Day on 10 October is a timely reminder that homelessness remains a serious concern in South Africa with the number of homeless people increasing over time. The 2022 Census recorded 55,719 people experiencing homelessness across the country, up from the 13 135 counted in 1996. It is widely acknowledged that the 2022 Census is a significant undercount in general.

Entrenched homelessness refers to people being without a home for more than five years. This is a hard-to-reach group with generally increased problems even over other people who are homeless. We don’t have enough information to understand their context and problems.

In 2020, Jonathan Hopkins, Jesse Laitinen and I conducted a survey of homeless people in Cape Town, working with organisations that provide services to this community. This cooperation enabled us to reach more homeless people and increased the likely trust of respondents in the survey. Within the larger sample of 350 respondents, there was a sub-group of 157 respondents who fitted the definition of entrenched homeless. They have found their own lifestyle setting them apart even from other homeless people.

The mean age of the group was 42.1 years, while 69% were men and 31% women. They didn’t often use emergency and other shelters, which are the major housing services provided by the City. Over 75% reported sleeping outside in temporary spaces, either in urban areas or in parks / vacant lots, increasing their vulnerability. The remainder moved between different temporary accommodations.

Respondents generated income independently. They reported an average income of R90 a day, but this varied considerably among them and will likely vary over time. They earned an income mainly through what is termed “skarreling”, made up of guarding cars, collecting recycling, handouts from households or at traffic lights, or payment for small jobs.

A small number live off disability grants. To maintain these earnings, most have moved into commercial centres or wealthier neighbourhoods where the opportunities of earning money are higher.

Members of the public often stigmatise and demand that they be removed from their areas, complaining of disruptive behaviour of generating a mess. Living in these areas does increase the likelihood of conflict with police, and nearly 70% of the group reported being arrested and 16% reported being arrested more than eight times.

Many of the “arrests” do not include being formally charged. They are picked up by police and put in a cell overnight, then released the next day. In this process, police generally confiscate or destroy their limited possessions. More than 50% reported spending time in prison, making it difficult to find work later.

Homeless people are more vulnerable to health problems, including infectious diseases and trauma. Almost half of the respondents in our survey reported visiting a hospital, and 55% a clinic in the three months prior to the survey. While not explored extensively in our study, mental health problems are also common, particularly those related to the impacts of trauma.

The complex nature of health problems among homeless people places a financial strain on state health services. This is made worse by them struggling to adhere to treatment. They consistently relapse in more severe symptoms and develop resistance to conventional medicine for diseases such as HIV and TB. They also use substances such as alcohol, methamphetamines, mandrax and marijuana regularly to survive their harsh living conditions and the impacts of trauma.

This group did not move onto the streets by choice and do not choose to stay there. The reasons for being on the street vary from loss of employment, being forced out of their homes, conflict with other family members, physical or sexual violence, particularly for women, to ongoing substance use.

While high levels of poverty and unemployment persist, it is hard to rehabilitate this group and to reduce the increasing number of people moving into life on the street. They have made the streets ‘home’ and are hardest to move out of homelessness due to complex intersecting needs. Their survival mechanisms and daily habits become a lifestyle that is hard to break.

Temporary solutions such as shelters provide limited support and have little impact on this community. Assisting an entrenched homeless person to move back into society requires wraparound services, including a place to live, personal support, protected work, job training, health interventions and supported access to rehabilitation services as Jon Hopkins, Joanne de Goede and Sam Vos pointed out in their chapter in Facing homelessness: Finding inclusionary, collaborative solutions (2021). These approaches have been shown internationally to provide solutions.

Some developmental organisations in Cape Town, such as U-turn and Streetscapes who facilitated this survey, have been working successfully with homeless people to move them back into employment and reconnecting them with families and getting their own homes. However, their reach is limited due to insufficient resources and the need to further develop and scale effective approaches for our local context.

*Dr Donald Skinner is affiliated with the Division of Health Systems and Public Health at Stellenbosch University. This article is based on the paper ‘The Entrenched Homeless Population and the Particular Challenges that they and their Service Providers Face’, co-authored with Jonathan Hopkins and Jesse Laitinen and published recently in the International Journal on Homelessness (2026).

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By Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School.

For much of their modern history, universities enjoyed an authority that they rarely had to explain. They determined what counted as legitimate knowledge, who was qualified to produce it, how claims should be tested and who had demonstrated sufficient mastery to be awarded a qualification.

South African universities inherited this tradition while confronting an additional question about whose knowledge had been legitimised and whose had been excluded. Debates about transformation and decolonisation were therefore never simply arguments about curriculum. They were also arguments about epistemic authority.

Artificial intelligence introduces a different challenge to that authority. A student can now ask an AI system to explain an economic model, critique an argument, write computer code or summarise research within seconds.

The answer may be excellent, mediocre, subtly wrong or entirely fabricated. Either way, access to explanation no longer depends on entering the university’s knowledge system.

The internet had already weakened the university’s control over information. AI goes further by making interactive explanations available at negligible marginal cost, while the cost of determining whether an answer deserves confidence does not fall at the same rate. What changes is not the university’s capacity to produce knowledge, but its position between knowledge and those seeking it.

AI makes that separation possible because it can turn scholarship into answers without requiring users to encounter the scholars, evidence or institutions from which those answers derive.

The challenge facing the university is therefore not simply technological. It is whether an institution can retain epistemic authority when others increasingly control the interface between its knowledge and the public.

The growing importance of that interface gives AI systems influence over which sources become visible, which ideas are compressed and whether users encounter the original scholarship at all. A plausible synthesis can remove the need to return to the research from which it was assembled. AI platforms can therefore acquire epistemic power without acquiring equivalent epistemic authority.

The connection to decolonisation goes deeper than representation. Decolonisation has always concerned who has the power to produce knowledge, organise it into recognised categories and determine which forms acquire authority.

AI shifts part of that organising power towards systems whose outputs depend on what has been digitised, indexed and made legible at scale. Digitising archives, strengthening African-language resources and making locally produced scholarship discoverable are no longer peripheral technological tasks.

They influence whether epistemic transformation travels beyond the university itself. Universities could win the argument over what belongs in the curriculum while losing influence over what becomes visible outside it.

The separation between producing a convincing answer and possessing the judgement behind it becomes especially consequential inside the classroom. Universities have understandably focused on students using AI to produce assignments.

Detection software and redesigned assessments address a real problem, but can preserve the wrong question. The more important question is what intellectual capability a qualification is supposed to certify when producing a competent answer no longer demonstrates that the student can reason towards it.

The university’s response cannot be to recreate the scarcity that AI has removed. Universities will have to become more explicit about what they are certifying. A graduate’s value cannot rest only on producing competent work when machines can increasingly assist in producing it. It must also rest on the ability to interrogate evidence, recognise uncertainty, defend choices and remain accountable for conclusions reached using those models.

Building education around those capabilities is harder than declaring them important. Demonstrating judgement requires academic attention that is already scarce in large classes and heavily burdened institutions. South African universities cannot respond by assuming unlimited lecturer time.

They must identify points within a qualification where direct verification matters most. Universities do not need to establish that every sentence in every assignment originated with a student. They do need credible moments when students demonstrate that the judgement being certified is genuinely theirs.

The goal should be to establish not whether students can work without AI, but whether they can recognise when a model is wrong, incomplete or unworthy of reliance. The challenge is no longer to prove that every answer was produced without AI. It is to establish that the graduate can think when the answer is already available.

The institutional response must extend beyond teaching. Universities that produce knowledge increasingly encountered through AI have an interest in whether that knowledge remains visible, attributable and open to scrutiny.

Protecting the discoverability of scholarship and the connection between claims, evidence and their sources becomes part of protecting academic authority itself.

Universities will retain important advantages in research and awarding qualifications, while AI systems become increasingly capable intermediaries between knowledge and its users.

The resulting division of labour changes what academic authority must rest upon. When answers become abundant, authority depends less on possession of the answer and more on the capacity to establish where it came from, why it deserves confidence and who remains accountable when it is wrong.

The university’s future role may therefore be defined less by its control over knowledge than by its ability to preserve the conditions under which knowledge can still command justified trust.

©Higher Education Media Services.

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By Rhys Evans

South Africa’s Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) demerit system changes how traffic rules are enforced. In the past, companies and drivers often treated traffic fines as minor costs.

The new system changes this by attaching real, immediate consequences to poor driving. At the heart of this change is Driving Under the Influence (DUI), which now brings severe risks for both everyday drivers and business fleets.

Under AARTO, every driver starts with zero points. Points build up with every traffic offence and exceeding 15 demerit points results in a licence suspension of three months for every point above the threshold, meaning any points over 15 add another three months of suspension per point. Because a DUI offence can result in six demerit points, a driver who already has accumulated points from other offences could quickly find themselves facing licence suspension.

The personal and business impact of losing a licence

For private drivers, losing a licence creates immediate chaos and unexpected costs. Getting to work, taking children to school, and doing daily chores suddenly require help from family or expensive trips using e-hailing services.

For businesses, the consequences can be even more significant. When a staff member who drives for a living loses a licence, that individual can no longer perform core duties. Because this is a legal issue caused by driver misconduct, the employer may have to navigate complex HR processes to reassign work or start dismissal proceedings.

Simply ignoring the suspension and letting an employee drive is not an option. Driving with a suspended licence is a criminal offence that can lead to arrest and jail time. For the employer, allowing an unlicensed or suspended driver to operate a vehicle could result in the insurer declining a claim or repudiating cover, depending on the policy terms. If an accident happens, the company could pay for all damages and claims out of pocket.

Vehicle operating cards and fleet risks

The demerit system does not only target individual drivers; it also applies to the operating cards attached to business vehicles. If a commercial vehicle accumulates too many demerit points, the operating card is suspended, keeping that vehicle off the road for three months per extra point.

Grounding a delivery truck or fleet vehicle can create significant financial consequences. Even when a vehicle sits idle in a yard making no money, the business still has to pay monthly vehicle finance, insurance premiums, and depreciation. Trying to run a vehicle with a suspended operating card will result in cancelled insurance claims and direct criminal charges against the company.

Taking control with depot testing and vehicle interlocks

Relying solely on staff to self-regulate after drinking is a poor risk-management strategy, because alcohol naturally lowers the ability to make sound decisions. South Africa’s legal limits are low, meaning even minimal consumption can cause a driver to fail a breathalyzer test. To protect fleets and keep operations running, employers need to stop reacting to problems and start preventing them.

Companies must put clear, zero-tolerance alcohol policies in place. For businesses with a central yard or depot, mandatory breath testing should happen every time a driver takes out a vehicle and when returning at the end of the day.

For long-distance transport or drivers who stay on the road, installing ignition interlocks (in-vehicle breathalyzers) provides a strong additional layer of protection. These devices require the driver to blow a zero-alcohol breath test before the engine will start, physically stopping an impaired person from driving. By combining clear policies with reliable testing tools, businesses can protect fleet assets, keep insurance valid, and avoid the heavy penalties of the AARTO system.

Essential admin and legal steps to limit AARTO risk

In addition to preventative steps such as alcohol screening, businesses must protect their vehicle operating cards through strict administrative control. First, operators should ensure the actual driver is nominated within the applicable AARTO timeframes, so demerit points transfer to the individual rather than accumulating against the company vehicle. Appointing an official AARTO proxy ensures these fine redirection deadlines and vehicle assignment logs are managed without fail.

Employment contracts and HR policies must also state that holding a valid licence is a strict job requirement, making fine reporting mandatory. Finally, obtaining written consent to run periodic checks on the National Contravention Register allows fleet managers to catch suspended drivers immediately, while automated telematics link every trip to a specific driver for rapid nomination.

Combining clear policies with reliable testing tools and strict administrative oversight is the most effective way for businesses to protect fleet assets, keep insurance valid, and avoid the heavy penalties of the AARTO system.

Rhys Evans is Managing Director of ALCO-Safe.

©Higher Education Media Services.

Walk into a five-star hotel lobby, a bustling restaurant, or a modern corporate reception, and every detail is carefully curated to make you feel welcome. But there is one unwelcome guest that can instantly shatter that illusion: a single flying insect. What used to be dismissed as a mere seasonal annoyance has quietly become a major operational risk.

Today, in customer-facing spaces, a pest sighting does more than just annoy people. It instantly makes them question your hygiene standards, food safety, and overall quality. Yet, for decades, the tools used to manage pests have felt entirely out of place in these polished environments, relying on heavy-handed tactics that miss the mark on modern sustainability.

The hidden pathogen threat right outside our doors

To understand why this matters so much today, we need to acknowledge a reality we rarely discuss: the environment in which urban pests live has changed dramatically. With crowded cities, strained municipal water streams, and overloaded waste systems, common flies have closer access to serious contamination than ever before.

Imagine a school, a retail hub, or a restaurant situated anywhere near an overstretched waste collection point or a compromised local river. Flies breeding in those conditions act as unwanted delivery vehicles, carrying pathogens like E. coli and dysentery straight from the source onto dining tables, kitchen counters, and customer touchpoints. When urban waste and natural waterways sit so close to our doorsteps, an insect sighting indoors is no longer just an aesthetic flaw. It is a direct biological threat to public health.

Moving past the shortcomings of legacy traps

Despite these rising risks, traditional pest control has relied for too long on conventional fluorescent traps that create as many problems as they solve. Older fluorescent tubes are energy-hungry, fragile, and packed with hazardous mercury. Aesthetically, they are bulky and industrial, forcing facility managers to hide them away in back corridors where they cannot effectively intercept pests before they reach customer areas.

When those traditional traps fail to keep up, businesses often resort to quick fixes like aerosol sprays and chemical insecticides. But how often do we stop to think about the residue of those chemicals? Staff and patrons rarely use masks or gloves when sprays are discharged, leaving microscopic toxins to settle quietly on carpets, soft furnishings, and nearby surfaces. It is a reactive approach that treats symptoms while creating new environmental and health concerns.

Redefining front-of-house standards with smart technology

Fortunately, modern hygiene engineering is closing that gap by combining rigorous biological protection with true environmental care. The shift starts with multi-wavelength UV-LED technology. Instead of relying on a single, one-dimensional light spectrum that only attracts a narrow band of insects, multi-wavelength LEDs use targeted frequencies to draw in a much broader range of flying pests.

At the same time, these systems consume a fraction of the electricity required by legacy units and are entirely mercury-free, helping organisations support their decarbonisation goals.

We can also replace high-voltage zappers, which scatter insect fragments, with high-efficiency, non-toxic glue boards that quietly and securely trap pests upon contact. This eliminates the invisible fallout of chemical aerosols and insect particulate matter, safeguarding indoor air quality and food safety.

Transforming hygiene into a core brand and ESG pillar

For decision-makers in hospitality, retail, and healthcare, adopting design-conscious hardware changes the entire conversation around cleanliness. Contemporary LED units feature slim, architectural profiles that blend into upmarket interiors rather than sticking out like an eyesore.

When premium hygiene equipment is visibly integrated into a front-of-house setting, it sends a clear message to customers that the establishment cares deeply about the finer details of their health and experience.

Innovative hygiene is no longer an invisible utility tucked away out of sight. It is an active part of brand identity and ESG commitment. Upgrading to smart LED pest control is an effective way for businesses to protect public health, reduce energy consumption, and demonstrate that sustainability and high hygiene standard can go hand in hand.

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By Prof. Bismark Tyobeka, principal and vice-chancellor of the North-West University (NWU).

There are young South Africans – doctors in training – living in deplorable circumstances thousands of kilometres away in Cuba. In a few years, they will have the lives of their countrymen here in their hands.

When I read a recent report about the living conditions they are subjected to in Cuba as part of the Nelson Mandela–Fidel Castro Medical Training Programme, my emotions fluctuated between fury and sadness.

They reportedly have to endure overcrowded and unsanitary accommodation, food and water shortages, inadequate payments and considerable psychological strain. In response, the Department of Health acknowledged that it had not conducted an oversight visit to assess students’ living conditions since 2022, citing financial pressures and austerity measures.

My understanding is that South Africa has trained 3 277 doctors through the Nelson Mandela–Fidel Castro programme to date. For that, we are paying millions of rands. The current all-inclusive cost in Cuba is R185 300 per student per year – approximately R1.12 million over six years.

But the cost does not end there. Returning students undergo a further 18 months of clinical integration training in South Africa, currently costing approximately R500 000 per student. This brings the combined cost to around R1.62 million for each student. Given the scale and longevity of the programme, the cumulative investment over its three decades would conservatively run into several billion rand.

The sanctions imposed by the US on Cuba undoubtedly add to the strain faced by our students, and we need to be honest enough both to condemn the harshness of these sanctions and to ask whether South Africa still needs to train doctors in Cuba. Yes, we have to acknowledge the programme’s historical contribution to our medical sector since its inception in 1996, with the first South African students participating in 1997.

But since then, our country has established an additional two medical schools, with the North-West University’s Desmond Tutu School of Medicine set to become the third in 2028, bringing the total number of medical schools in the country to 11.

Would the funds being spent on training our students in Cuba not be better invested in local medical schools and academic hospitals? Our national medical landscape – both in need and capacity – has changed substantially over the past 30 years.

South Africa has a dire shortage of medical doctors, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, and this shortage can have catastrophic consequences for the country’s healthcare and economic sectors, which are already under severe strain.

In the public sector, South Africa has 0.37 doctors per 1 000 people, in stark contrast to the WHO’s minimum recommendation of one doctor per 1 000 people. Yet, as our population continues to grow and lifestyle diseases continue to increase at alarming rates, we still resist giving our aspiring doctors the training and support they need to deal with our unique circumstances.

Let’s ask another question. How can we continue to justify sending students for medical training to a country where their training is not fit for purpose for South Africa’s medical needs? When they return to South Africa, they need to be taught what could have formed part of their training from the start.

Our NWU Desmond Tutu School of Medicine recently received official accreditation for its Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) programme from the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) of the Council on Higher Education (CHE). We achieved this because our programme caters to the specific needs of our province and our country.

I am also not advocating that the training of South Africa’s medical students should be confined to our borders. On the contrary, that would be severely short-sighted. International expertise is invaluable. South African medical students should be exposed to the best medical institutions, specialists, research and healthcare systems the world has to offer.

But international exposure need not mean outsourcing an entire medical degree. Exchange programmes, clinical electives, research collaborations and specialist training can provide international experience while the core medical qualification is completed in South Africa. We need that balance. However, Cuba is not the answer.

That a programme was once needed and successful does not mean that ending it would make it a failure. I, like many others, am advocating for a new approach – one suited to our current needs, not those of decades past.

We cannot afford not to develop expertise that will benefit our country. We cannot allow our medical sector to resemble our country’s failing industries, which demand more from taxpayers than they supply. We cannot be afraid to say this. We are participants in this democracy, not its puppets.

Let’s cut the strings. Let’s give our aspiring doctors what they need. Let’s give them a home.

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By Professor Lindelani Mnguni, Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria.

There is perhaps no recent statistic that captures the urgency of South Africa’s education challenge more starkly than this: a 2025 national survey found that only around 30% of learners in Grades 1 to 3 are meeting the reading benchmarks expected for their grade.

This reinforces the most troubling finding from the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which revealed that 81% of South Africa’s Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning.

Taken together, these figures should be sounding the alarm bells at every level of our society, our educational system, and our planning – roughly seven out of every ten South African children are falling behind in the foundational reading skills they need, and they’re falling behind basically from the moment they start their formal schooling.

Strengthening our education system

Reading is the gateway to learning. A child who cannot read with understanding will struggle in virtually every subject, and difficulties that begin in the early years can follow learners throughout their schooling and limit their opportunities beyond the classroom.

Although there is no single solution to a challenge of this scale, strengthening early literacy interventions – and introducing new ones – would be a good starting point for South Africa. These interventions should support stronger and more appropriate learning materials, effective school leadership, and sustained investment in education.

But the success of these interventions depends on the teachers who bring them into our classrooms.

It is clear that we need more teachers in our classrooms – but numbers alone are not enough. Our teachers must be appropriately qualified, well prepared, and they need to understand how children learn. This will better equip them to recognise when a learner is falling behind and help ensure that they have the skills to intervene in time.

This makes one contradiction particularly difficult to accept: while South Africa has an urgent need for suitably qualified teachers, some graduates who have successfully completed their teaching qualifications face barriers to entering the profession because historical student debt prevents them from accessing their degree certificates.

These graduates have attended the lectures, passed their assessments, completed their teaching practice, and met the academic requirements for their qualifications. Yet, without their degree certificates, they face a barrier to obtaining full registration with the South African Council for Educators (SACE).

Getting more teachers into classrooms

Historical student debt is usually discussed as a higher education funding problem. And it is that, of course. Universities operate in a challenging financial environment and cannot simply disregard outstanding fees. But we also need to see historical student debt through another lens – as a barrier that prevents sorely needed skills from entering the very workplaces where they could in turn help unlock our children’s potential to make a difference.

At the University of Pretoria (UP), one in three graduates who are currently unable to access their degree certificates due to historical debt is a qualified teacher. These are people in whom considerable time, effort, and resources have already been invested. Yet that investment cannot achieve its intended impact if they remain unable to enter the profession.

Graduates who find themselves in this situation may face unemployment and delayed economic independence, while schools and learners lose access to teachers who are already qualified.

As we mark World Teachers’ Day on 5 October, we will rightly celebrate the teachers already doing this work. South African teachers work in extraordinarily varied – and often difficult – circumstances. Many teach in overcrowded classrooms, contend with limited resources, and respond every day to social challenges that inevitably enter the school gates with their learners.

But World Teachers’ Day should also prompt us to think about the teachers we have trained but have not yet managed to get into classrooms. We cannot speak about improving literacy and educational outcomes without examining the barriers that prevent qualified people from entering the teaching profession.

Solving a vexing problem

Addressing historical student debt is complex. The debt cannot simply be written off, nor can universities solve the problem alone. This is a vexing problem that requires collaboration between higher education, government, business, foundations, alumni, and civil society, so we can find targeted solutions that can help more graduates move into employment.

UP’s Degrees Delivered campaign, launched in mid-2026, is one response, helping eligible graduates with historical debt gain access to the degree certificates they have earned. But this issue is bigger than one campaign or one university. We should be asking what more can be done to remove the barriers between qualification and employment.

For teachers, the potential impact is multiplied many times over. Over a career, one teacher can teach hundreds, even thousands, of learners. Therefore, when 81% of our Grade 4 learners cannot read for comprehension, and many children are falling behind even earlier, South Africa cannot afford to leave teaching talent unused.

This World Teachers’ Day, we should celebrate the teachers standing at the front of our classrooms. But we should also ask how many qualified teachers are still waiting outside them – and what it will take to get them through the door.

©Higher Education Media Services.

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By Musa Masungwini, Security and Resiliency Platforms Specialist at Dell Technologies South Africa

Cybersecurity Awareness Month gives businesses a timely opportunity to look beyond traditional cyber awareness and assess whether their AI environments are ready for real-world risk. As South Africa’s sovereign AI ambitions accelerate, the core question is shifting from data location to operational trust: can the full AI environment be secured, governed, audited and recovered?

Sovereign AI is often framed around data residency, national infrastructure and strategic autonomy. Those are important, but they are not enough. A model can run in-country and still create risk if the data pipeline is poorly governed, identity controls are weak, suppliers are opaque, agentic AI actions are unaudited, or recovery has never been tested.

“This matters because AI is becoming more operational. Future AI models will not only generate answers. Increasingly, agentic AI systems will retrieve data, interact with applications, trigger workflows and support decisions across business processes”, says Musa Masungwini, Security and Resiliency Platforms Specialist, Dell Technologies South Africa.

For CIOs, this changes the sovereign AI conversation. The issue is no longer simply: where does our data sit? The more practical questions are now: who or what can access it, how does it move through AI workflows, which suppliers touch the infrastructure, can AI actions be monitored, and can the organisation recover if something goes wrong?

The South African context makes this urgent. The country’s data protection regime under POPIA already places clear obligations on how personal information is processed, secured and accounted for, and momentum is building toward a broader AI governance and accountability framework as adoption accelerates across the public and private sectors. For CIOs, that trajectory points in one direction: AI environments will increasingly need to prove control, not just claim it.

The broader technology industry is reinforcing the same message. In August 2026, an OpenAI-led open letter signed by more than 100 organisations, including Dell, warned of a limited window to strengthen cyber defences as increasingly capable AI models make attacks more widespread and sophisticated. It also highlighted the opportunity to use advanced AI to help defenders identify vulnerabilities and address longstanding weaknesses more quickly.

“For businesses, the implication is clear: sovereign AI cannot be treated as a location decision alone. It needs to become a full-stack trust decision. Data residency provides control over location, but operational confidence also depends on identity, access, infrastructure security, supplier assurance, observability and recovery,” says Musa.

For CIOs, the first shift is to treat sovereign AI as an architecture decision. Data residency is one layer, but it must sit within a wider design that includes identity, access control, encryption, monitoring, supplier assurance, recovery and auditability. The right question is not simply whether AI runs in public cloud, private cloud, on premises, edge or device environments. It is which placement gives the best balance of performance, control, compliance, cost and resilience.

The next shift is to govern data movement and agentic AI actions. AI systems depend on data that is accessible, accurate, protected and recoverable. But as agentic AI becomes more capable, the issue is no longer only what data a model uses. It is what AI can access, what it can change, when human approval is required, and how every action is logged.

“For businesses operating in sensitive or regulated environments, the real issue is not only data protection. It is data accountability. As AI becomes more agentic, businesses need to prove where data comes from, how it moves, which systems or AI agents can act on it, and whether it can be recovered cleanly after disruption. Sovereign AI will only be trusted if businesses can evidence control across the full data lifecycle, not just show where data is stored,” says Musa.

And then the third shift is recovery that must be designed from the start. Sovereign AI cannot be considered trusted if the organisation cannot recover the data, systems and workflows behind it. Dell’s EMEA Cyber Resilience Insights found that 99% of organisations have cyber resilience strategies in place, yet 59% failed to recover effectively from their last test or incident.

For sovereign AI, that gap is not just an IT issue. It is a trust issue. If an AI-enabled public service, financial workflow, healthcare system or industrial process is disrupted, the enterprise must be able to restore clean data, recover critical systems and maintain continuity.

This is especially important in South Africa, where businesses are being asked to show that critical technology environments are not only compliant on paper, but secure, governed and recoverable in practice. For sovereign AI, that means proving control over infrastructure, suppliers, access, data flows, AI actions and recovery across the full stack.

“For CIOs, the priority should be to move sovereign AI from policy intent to infrastructure proof. That means designing AI environments where workload placement, data movement, supplier assurance, access control and recovery are built into the architecture from the start.

As AI becomes more autonomous, trust will depend on whether the infrastructure beneath it can prove control: where data lives, how it moves, who or what can act on it, and how quickly clean operations can be restored if disruption occurs,” says Musa.

The business case is also clear. Dell’s Modern Enterprise Readiness Index shows that 95% of organisations agree that working with a trusted partner reduces the risk associated with adopting new technologies, and 95% say that it helps achieve measurable outcomes from technology investments more quickly.

That matters because sovereign AI is not a one-off deployment. It is a long-term operating model built on trusted infrastructure, secure data, resilient platforms and accountable governance.

“For CIOs, the priority now is to move from data residency to full-stack trust. That is how sovereign AI becomes credible, scalable and ready for the next generation of AI,” concludes Musa.

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As the world marks the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste on 29 September under the theme “Transformative Potential of Reducing Food Loss and Waste”, Professor Lembe Magwaza, Chair of the South Africa-Germany Bilateral Research Chair in Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems (SARChI SuReFoodS), reflects on this global challenge and its profound impact on South Africa and the wider African continent.

In this article, Magwaza explains how food is lost and wasted across the value chain. He also outlines his vision for equipping smallholder farmers with technology, strengthening their contribution to food security and bridging the divide between South Africa’s “two agricultures”.

Magwaza, an NRF-rated scholar and internationally recognised plant scientist and postharvest technology expert, became Chair of SARChI SuReFoodS this year. Based at the University of Mpumalanga, the Chair is funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and Germany through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

It is one of approximately 250 active Research Chairs established under the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI). Launched in 2006 by the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) and the NRF, SARChI strengthens research and innovation capacity at South African public universities by supporting leading researchers and Chairs that produce high-quality research, innovation and postgraduate researchers.

Magwaza reflects on the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste in a question-and-answer format.

How do you conceptualise food loss and food waste within the context of your research?

Food loss and waste are major threats to food security, nutrition and sustainable food systems in South Africa, across Africa and globally. The terms are distinct: “food loss” is a reduction in the quantity or quality of food from production and harvest through handling, storage, processing, transport and distribution, before retail. “Food waste” occurs mainly at retail, food service and household levels.

An estimated 30% to 50% of global food production is lost or wasted instead of contributing to food and nutrition security. Losses for dry grain crops such as maize, wheat and millet are lower but can still reach 30% — about one-third of production that is discarded, sent to landfill or never reaches consumers.

For highly perishable horticultural crops, losses can rise to 50% in worst-case scenarios, particularly in smallholder farming systems. Their high moisture content encourages pathogens, while poor postharvest handling, inadequate cold-chain management and breaks in temperature control accelerate deterioration, senescence and spoilage.

As postharvest scientists, our role is to preserve quality by slowing ripening, senescence and deterioration. The high moisture content of horticultural crops supports the growth of pathogenic microorganisms that cause spoilage. In some cases, these microorganisms also produce harmful compounds, including mycotoxins, which may be lethal or carcinogenic and therefore threaten food safety.

Food loss should consequently include not only the complete loss of food along the value chain, but also losses in nutritional and economic value, safety and other quality attributes.

You argue that food waste occurs primarily at the retail, food service and consumer levels. How do consumers contribute to food waste?

Consumers contribute to food waste through their purchasing habits and expectations of quality and appearance. Convenience and bulk pricing are common drivers. A kilogram of packaged tomatoes, peppers or another product may cost less per unit than a single item because retailers want to sell in bulk. However, someone living alone in Sandton or Mbombela may not need a kilogram and may discard what they cannot consume.

Consumer demand for produce of a particular shape, colour, aroma or packaging also drives waste. Biological products are never perfectly uniform, yet strict market specifications can leave nutritious, healthy produce without a buyer simply because it is cosmetically imperfect.

We therefore need agro-processing and value-addition technologies that convert surplus, cosmetically rejected and highly perishable produce into nutritious, shelf-stable products.

What is the emerging picture regarding societal demand for redress in relation to food loss and waste?

We must recognise the dual nature of South Africa’s agricultural and food system. Agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo recently explored this in his book The Country of Two Agricultures. South Africa has a highly developed commercial agricultural sector alongside a large smallholder sector dominated by black farmers.

Many smallholder farmers have limited access to cold-chain infrastructure, technology, finance, markets and technical knowledge. These constraints increase food losses and make it difficult to supply formal markets consistently with quality produce.

How, then, do we support these farmers? This is where SARChI SuReFoodS, the portfolio I lead, can contribute. Our research develops sustainable approaches that help farmers preserve food quality while improving the economic viability of their operations.

Because some farmers lack electricity, we must explore suitable technologies such as evaporative and charcoal-based cooling. These affordable, environmentally friendly options can preserve perishable produce and help more smallholder farmers participate in cold-chain and mainstream food value chains.

We must also generate evidence to inform policy and teach smallholder farmers how to prevent food loss and waste so that their operations remain economically sustainable. This would help them enter mainstream agriculture, narrow the divide between the “two agricultures” and support a just and equitable food system.

Given that the Research Chair is newly established, what key outcomes would you aim to achieve over the next five years, and what indicators would you use to evaluate the Chair’s research impact and success?

My specialist field has been postharvest technology, which focuses on preserving food after harvest. Over time, however, I came to understand that postharvest technologies alone do not determine food quality; preharvest management is equally important.

We must produce high-quality food and then preserve that quality throughout the value chain. Poor quality at the outset is very difficult to correct or maintain after harvest.

My measure of success for this portfolio returns to the issue of South Africa’s “two agricultures”. I want smallholder farmers in Nkomazi and Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga, Bergville and Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal, Ngcobo in the Eastern Cape, and elsewhere in South Africa to run profitable, sustainable enterprises.

They should be able to enter mainstream agricultural and food supply chains and supply quality food consistently throughout the year. South Africa’s diverse climatic conditions make this achievable, but academic institutions such as UMP, working through initiatives such as SARChI SuReFoodS, must partner closely with farmers to build the knowledge needed for sustainable operations.

My main measure of success would be seeing farmers move from subsistence production to economically viable enterprises that contribute meaningfully to food and nutrition security and the agricultural economy.

Lastly, I want a South African food system that is less dependent on the current retail model. Smallholder farmers should view each community as an ecosystem in which food is produced and sold locally. This would improve local nutrition security and, if replicated across communities, strengthen food and nutrition security throughout South Africa.

Let’s talk smallholder farmers and technology. Are there any technological gaps that you think need to be addressed as we move forward?

Several technological gaps need attention, many of which reflect the divide between South Africa’s “two agricultures”. One of the most fundamental is cold-chain management: maintaining each crop at its optimal temperature throughout storage and transport.

Commercial farmers are generally better equipped to manage cold chains because their production volumes justify dedicated infrastructure. Each commodity has specific temperature requirements: bananas, for example, need considerably warmer transport conditions than apples. Storing commodities with different requirements in the same refrigeration system makes it difficult to maintain optimal conditions for each crop.

Smallholder farmers may lack knowledge of each crop’s temperature requirements and, because they produce limited volumes, may store different crops together. Many also lack refrigeration infrastructure altogether.

A farmer cultivating vegetables on a small plot may not earn enough to invest in a dedicated cold room. We therefore need aggregation and service enterprises that collect produce from several smallholder farmers and provide properly managed refrigeration and storage facilities.

An entrepreneur could, for example, operate cold rooms at different temperatures for different commodities. Shared infrastructure of this kind would make postharvest technology more accessible to smallholder farmers while creating economic opportunities in rural communities.

©Higher Education Media Services.

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By Ruda Murray

“Rivers are the arteries of our planet; they are lifelines in the truest sense.” – Mark Angelo.

We do not think about rivers as often as we should. They flow quietly through landscapes, cities, and histories, supplying water, sustaining ecosystems, and shaping human civilisation. And yet, like so many things we depend on, they are often taken for granted.

World Rivers Day, observed annually on the fourth Sunday of September (on 27 September in 2026), is not simply a celebration of waterways. First established in 2005, following global efforts to raise awareness about freshwater systems, World Rivers Day now spans more than 100 countries. It highlights the critical importance of rivers not only as ecological systems but as foundations of human survival and development. Around two billion people rely directly on rivers for drinking water. Rivers sustain roughly 62% of the world’s irrigated agriculture and support hydropower systems that generate approximately 17% of global electricity.

They are, quite literally, lifelines.

And yet, they are under unprecedented pressure.

Globally, rivers are increasingly burdened by pollution, over-extraction, habitat fragmentation, and climate change. An estimated 70–80% of ocean plastics originate from land-based sources, much of it carried to the sea by rivers.

Similarly, hundreds of tonnes of pesticides enter marine environments each year via river systems, while sediment pollution—driven by land degradation, deforestation, and urbanisation—now affects approximately 40% of the world’s largest rivers.

In many regions, rivers no longer reach the sea.

These pressures are not isolated. They are interconnected.

The crisis is not only ecological but also deeply social and political. Approximately 60% of global freshwater flows occur in transboundary basins shared by multiple countries. Yet cooperative governance arrangements remain limited. At the same time, unregulated activities such as artisanal mining continue to contaminate river systems with mercury and other toxins, affecting hundreds of river basins worldwide.

These challenges are also increasingly recognised at the continental level. Reflecting the urgency of Africa’s growing water crisis, the African Union has declared 2026 the Year of “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063.” This theme underscores that water security is not merely an environmental concern but a prerequisite for food security, public health, climate resilience, economic development, and regional integration.

Healthy rivers are indispensable to achieving these objectives. They sustain agriculture, replenish groundwater, support biodiversity, provide drinking water, and underpin the resilience of communities and economies across the continent. Protecting rivers is therefore not simply an environmental imperative, but a prerequisite for achieving both Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Against this continental backdrop, the picture in South Africa is equally concerning. Every day, billions of litres of untreated or inadequately treated sewage enter our rivers and dams, placing immense strain on already vulnerable freshwater systems. These are not abstract statistics; they translate into declining water quality, ecosystem collapse, and growing risks to human health and livelihoods.

This is precisely where universities have an important role to play. At Stellenbosch University (SU), environmental stewardship extends beyond research into practical environmental management. The University continues to collaborate with the Stellenbosch Municipality to protect and restore the natural landscapes that shape our shared environment. Guided by its Environmental Management Plan, SU jointly manages the Krom and Eerste Rivers—ecological corridors that sustain local biodiversity and community well-being.

In response to the challenges rivers face, a growing global movement is rethinking how we understand and protect them. More than 500 initiatives worldwide now explore recognising the rights of nature. In countries such as Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and Bangladesh, rivers have been recognised as legal persons—entities with rights, represented by guardians who can act on their behalf in legal and governance processes.

These developments signal a fundamental shift: from viewing rivers merely as resources to be managed to recognising them as living systems deserving of legal protection in their own right.

This very question—whether recognising rivers as legal persons can improve their protection and enforcement—was the focus of my recently published doctoral study Conferring rights to South Africa’s rivers: Improved protection and enforcement? A comparative law study (Nomos Verlag, 2026). The research demonstrates that where traditional governance frameworks fail, alternative legal approaches, such as rights-based models, may offer new avenues for accountability, representation, and protection.

Importantly, many of these efforts are driven not by governments, but by communities. Where existing systems fall short, people are advocating for legal mechanisms that allow rivers to be represented in decisions that affect their survival.

This raises an important question: what does meaningful protection of rivers actually require?

It requires more than awareness. More than annual observances. It requires governance systems capable of enforcement, legal frameworks that reflect ecological realities, and a societal willingness to rethink our relationship with the natural world.

World Rivers Day is therefore not only about celebrating rivers. It is about confronting the conditions under which they continue to exist.

Take a moment today to stand by a river—if you can. Watch it. Listen to it. Consider what it carries: water, yes, but also history, livelihoods, waste, and consequence.

Because the truth is simple and uncomfortable: the future of rivers is inseparable from our own.

If rivers are the lifelines of our planet, then their degradation is not merely an environmental issue—it is a warning about the future we are creating for ourselves.

*Dr Ruda Murray is a qualified lawyer and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Law at Stellenbosch University (SU). She is also a researcher with the Development and Rule of Law Programme at SU.

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By Albert Oosthuysen, CEO of Evotel and Net Nine Nine

Despite being regarded as Africa’s advance economy, South Africa is failing to position itself as a future-ready nation. Unless we accelerate investment in digital infrastructure and create the right incentives for growth, We will continue to fall behind.

While Minister Malatsi has been a welcome addition to the communications and digital technology portfolio, there is still significant work to be done, and the pace of reform now needs acceleration.

In July, there was a survey published by UCT researchers Martin Magidi and Tariro Chivige which was extensively covered by the South African media. The research looked at the state of skills in South Africa and some insights included:

• About 55% said workers demonstrated little or no proficiency in math or data skills

• At least 55% of the surveyed businesses believed their workforce had only basic digital skills and computer literacy. Just over half (52%) said it was difficult to find employees prepared for digital transformation while 70% rated their workforce’s technology skills as “poor” or “very poor”

These findings are supported by recently released data from NPO CollectiveX which identified 118 500 ICT vacancies – 36% of which were junior roles. They point to a glaring distinction between graduates with ICT tertiary qualifications and those being “work ready”.

This challenge is about far more than employment. It directly affects South Africa’s ability to compete on the global stage.

Each year, the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking assesses the world’s 70 most competitive economies. South Africa’s 2026 performance was encouraging, climbing to 54th globally, a welcome 10-place improvement from 2025.

The improvement was likely driven by governance reforms, including Operation Vulindlela and South Africa’s removal from the FATF Grey List in October 2025.

However, one of the key challenges IMD identifies was the lack of “provision of support for businesses in high-growth sectors” which is a great segue into the World Digital Competitiveness Report which looks at some of the digital-specific components impacting competitiveness.

Since 2021, South Africa has ranked between 54^th and 60^th but this only tells half a story.

If we analyse the 2025 data, South Africa actually ranks second in terms of the 69 surveyed economies in terms of “Total Public Expenditure on education” and sixth in the category of “Investment in Telecommunications” – based on those data points, we should be rapidly moving up the ranks as a digital economy.

However, here is the disconnect where we rank:

• 56^th for International Experience

• 67^th for Digital / Technology Skills

• 58^th for Employee Training

• 55^th for Graduates in Sciences

• 57^th for Women with Degrees

South Africa also ranks in the bottom third globally for the “Scientific Contribution” cluster, which measures investment in research and development, high-tech patent grants and the use of robotics in education and research.

This raises an obvious question: how can a country investing so heavily in education continue to fall behind?

Part of the answer lies in South Africa’s weak technological framework. We continue to rank poorly for communications technology (61st), internet users (62nd) and internet bandwidth speed (62nd).

Even the frequently cited mobile internet penetration figures deserve closer scrutiny. While mobile connectivity has improved significantly, South Africa still ranks only 50th globally for mobile broadband.

This is precisely why we continue to advocate for accelerated investment in digital infrastructure. Without it, South Africa will struggle to remain globally competitive.

Despite these challenges, I remain an optimist. As an entrepreneur, I believe South Africa has the ability to change course.

These rankings raise an important question about who South Africa should benchmark itself against. On one hand, we have an exceptionally sophisticated financial services sector that competes with the best in the world, allowing parts of our economy to perform well above their weight. On the other, millions of South Africans remain structurally excluded from meaningful economic participation because they lack reliable access to digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, economies such as Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana are increasingly competing with South Africa for investment capital through sustained investment in digital infrastructure. While they may not yet possess the sophistication of South Africa’s financial services ecosystem, they are attracting capital that ultimately translates into new infrastructure, improved skills and stronger long-term competitiveness.

We need to recognise that affordable, reliable digital infrastructure and internet access are no longer luxuries. They are foundational to economic growth, innovation, education and global competitiveness.

Across the continent, countries are investing in the digital infrastructure that will define tomorrow’s opportunities. If South Africa is serious about remaining globally competitive, attracting investment, creating jobs and unlocking the potential of its people, then building a future-ready economy begins with universal digital connectivity.

The question is no longer whether we can afford to prioritise internet access; it is whether we can afford not to.

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By Alex Cook Founder and Chief Executive Officer of fintech company Wealthbit.

Wellness days, EAPs, flexible hours — employers have spent years building programmes that address issues around health, mental health, work-life balance and more. Everything except the one thing actually keeping people up at night: Money stress.

This isn’t a story about rising costs or a hard year. Financial stress doesn’t wait for the economy to get worse, and it doesn’t disappear when it gets better, because it was never really about what things cost.

Some of the most financially stressed people we work with are senior leaders on strong salaries who have simply never had the systems to make that salary work for them. That’s an expensive blind spot: replacing a senior leader costs far more than replacing junior staff, and the people most likely to leave are often the ones you can least afford to lose. Anyone without the right support can be affected, whatever they earn.

The impact? Financial stress creates tension in relationships and eats into sleep and health. At work, it looks like someone running a confident 9am stand-up after spending the commute working out whether their card will go through at the petrol station. Nobody in the room knows.

The shame sits right next to the stress. Few people feel comfortable talking about their burgeoning debt, escalating household expenses and mounting bills, especially at work where they want to appear professional and in control.

No one does their best work with one eye on their bank balance.

Companies see the symptoms of financial stress in lower engagement, higher presenteeism and absenteeism and even greater retention risk. Absenteeism is easier to spot and address as the empty desks are a clear indication that people have not shown up.

What has an even greater impact on businesses and is by far harder to track is when employees are physically at work but have “checked out” mentally. The GIBS October Health Workplace Well-Being Report puts a number on unaddressed strain like this: Mental-health-related presenteeism alone costs South African employers R96,500 per employee a year, about seven times the cost of absenteeism.

In our Financial Stress Report over 80% said financial worries affected their energy, focus and motivation at work. The data also shows that people aren’t sitting still. They’re looking for ways to make it work, even if it means more work, or a different employer:

Almost half of respondents said they already have or are planning a side hustle to address their financial stress, with seven in 10 looking to address money issues with a job change.

While competitive salaries are an important hygiene factor, people’s ability to manage their income effectively, deal with unexpected expenses and make informed financial decisions is a fundamental requirement for financial wellbeing.

Two employees may earn the same salary but experience very different levels of financial stress due to their different circumstances, financial knowledge and existing commitments.

That’s why the conversation needs to move beyond asking whether employees are being paid enough. The next question has to be: Are we doing enough to help our employees put financial systems in place to actually make the most of that salary?

A bigger budget line will not fix this and neither will one more seminar on saving. In fact, most existing benefits aren’t addressing this structurally at all. What actually matters comes down to two things:

The first is clarity over knowledge. The people who manage money well aren’t the ones who know the most, they’re the ones who are clear on what they earn, what they owe, and what they’re actually trying to build. Most financial stress isn’t a knowledge gap, it’s confusion about what “enough” even looks like for your own life and context.

The second is systems over willpower. Nobody sticks to a resolution through a bad month. A habit that runs on its own, money moved the day after payday, a number checked every Friday, holds up regardless of how anyone’s feeling that week. Small and repeated beats big and occasional, every time.

Get those two things right, and people stop reacting to their money and start getting ahead of it. That’s the actual return: steadier focus, better decisions, and a team that stays because life feels manageable.

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When looking at the statistics around alcohol and drug use in South African workplaces, it is easy to get lost in the percentages. But behind every data point is a person, such as a crane operator, a long-haul truck driver, a miner, or a site supervisor.

South Africa ranks among the highest countries globally for alcohol consumption. When this reality intersects with industries reliant on heavy manual labour, tough working conditions and cheap, easily accessible alcohol, substance abuse stops being just a personal or social issue. It becomes a major safety risk that walks through the front gate every single morning.

The International Labour Organisation estimates that substance use contributes to between 15% and 30% of workplace accidents globally. Even more sobering is the fact that alcohol use increases the odds of a work-related accident by 78%. In safety-sensitive environments, that percentage represents real people who might not make it home safely at the end of a shift.

The regulatory disconnect across sectors

While the Mine Health and Safety Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act both mandate a zero-tolerance approach to substances at work, how this plays out in real life varies wildly.

In the mining sector, the approach is highly regulated. Because a single incident can result in tragic loss of life, immediate operational shutdowns and devastating financial fallout, mines have long relied on high-volume, automated testing systems.

However, looking at the construction and transport sectors, the picture changes. Large construction firms often enforce strict screening at site entrances, but smaller, rural sub-contracting sites frequently operate without testing protocols.

The logistics industry shows a similar divide. While top-tier transport fleets invest heavily in driver wellness, smaller operators often ignore substance screening entirely, combining the danger of impaired driving with long hours, driver fatigue, and poorly maintained vehicles.

Building a culture of safety, not catching people out

Buying a breathalyzer or a drug testing kit and handing it to a security guard is not a safety strategy. If a business deploys testing equipment without a human-centric framework, the point is lost.

The goal should never be to catch people out; the goal must be to create an environment where everyone feels safe. An effective, legally sound substance management strategy relies on three connected pillars.

1. The policy must have a clear purpose. A substance policy should not be a generic piece of paperwork hidden in an HR drawer. It must be a working document tailored to the actual risks of the business. Most importantly, it needs to outline fair, legally defensible procedures that protect both the organisation and the employee, clearly mapping out the steps for testing, fair disciplinary processes, and paths to rehabilitation.

2. The tools must match the environment. The testing hardware must make sense for the people using it. For example, forcing thousands of workers through a single manual testing device every morning creates massive delays and workplace frustration. High-risk, high-volume sites need automated, rapid-entry turnstiles, while smaller teams might only need mobile, highly accurate devices. Most importantly, the equipment must be properly calibrated, so the results are indisputable and legally fair to the worker.

3. There must be dialogue and awareness in the workplace. Testing works best when it is supported by education. When companies combine regular screening with open, non-judgmental awareness sessions, the workplace culture changes. Employees stop viewing breathalyzers as a purely punitive tool and start seeing them as a protective boundary. In fact, companies that talk openly about substance abuse see a significant increase in workers stepping forward to access internal counselling and support services before an accident ever happens.

The role of a real partner

Creating this kind of supportive safety ecosystem takes time and expertise. It requires moving away from simply buying a product off a shelf and moving toward a partnership with suppliers who understand the human and legal complexities involved. A true partner helps shape policy; trains staff to conduct tests respectfully and ensures equipment remains accurate and legally defensible.

Proactive substance management is about protecting the business and the people inside it. When employers invest in compassionate awareness, robust policies, and reliable hardware, it becomes possible to build a workplace culture where safety is shared, compliance is simple and every worker gets home safely.

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The killing of 38-year-old Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo has ripped open wounds I thought had long scarred over. Her story mirrors that of my sister, Pearl “Kokozi” Mkhuma, who was murdered in 2008 also at 38, and left discarded near the New Canada railway lines.

Both were young mothers, both vibrant, both full of life, and both reduced to lifeless bodies abandoned in places where no human being should ever be left. The similarities are haunting - their energy, their smiles, their love of life. It is as if history has repeated itself, mocking our grief, reminding us that the violence consuming our society spares no one.

When Kokozi was killed, she had left with a man she knew. Hours later, she was found shot and lifeless. The disbelief was overwhelming. I imagine Tsontso’s family is living through the same nightmare, unable to reconcile the image of their loved one with the brutality of her death.

These women were not statistics; they were mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. They were human beings whose lives mattered. Yet their killers treated them as disposable, stripping them of dignity even in death.

The pain of such loss is compounded by the children left behind. Tsontso’s eight‑year‑old daughter will grow up without her mother’s embrace. My sister’s children were only four and ten when she was murdered, and we were forced to raise them in the shadow of her absence.

This is the cruel legacy of violence: it does not end with the victim, it reverberates through families, communities, and generations. It leaves children scarred, parents broken, siblings hollowed out by grief.

We live in a society where safety is never guaranteed, where the fear of violence stalks us daily. And yet, this was not the dream we had when apartheid ended. We believed we were building a better South Africa, one where our daughters could walk freely, cycle to school, and live without fear of being stopped, harassed, or killed. That dream feels shattered.

Yes, we should be shocked but not surprised because South Africa is one of the most violent societies in the world, averaging 58 murders a day. While men make up the majority of homicide victims, women are disproportionately killed by intimate partners. The statistics are staggering, but they are not abstract. They are lived realities, embodied in the faces of Tsontso, Kokozi, and countless others who have died at the hands of men.

There is an uproar and rightfully so, when women are killed because by nature women are the most vulnerable and need protection from men. However, we seem to have normalised violence against men, and that normalisation is our greatest failure.

We have accepted the killing of men as routine and we don’t shout and scream about it, and in doing so, we have created a culture where violence against women is inevitable. If men are unsafe, how can women ever be safe?

We must confront the root of this violence and the fact that men are killing men at alarming rates. Estimates suggest that over 90% of killers of men are themselves men. This cycle of brutality cannot be ignored because it spills over into the vulnerable of our society.

If our communities are saturated with men who are dangerous to other men, then women and children will always be vulnerable. We cannot separate gender‑based violence from the broader epidemic of violence. To end femicide, we must first dismantle the culture of violence that has engulfed our society.

Solutions must be bold and uncompromising. We need to rebuild communities where life is valued, where killing is unthinkable.

It means strengthening policing and demanding accountability from a system that too often fails victims. And yes, it means debating justice - whether our society is ready to reintroduce the death penalty for those who kill with impunity like the killer or killers of the 9 women in Ekurhuleni. If we can accept that bank robbers can be shot on sight, why do we hesitate to punish murderers with equal severity?

But solutions cannot stop at punishment. We must also invest in prevention. That means tackling poverty, unemployment, and inequality, which fuel desperation and violence. Having police visibility, not just a police van rushing off to somewhere, but those slow-moving cars watching and looking out for the citizens.

It means providing mental health services to communities ravaged by trauma. It means supporting families so that children grow up in environments of love rather than violence. It means building a culture where every life - male or female - is sacred.

I refuse to see violence only through the lens of gender. Violence is a national crisis, a plague that devours men, women, and children alike. To focus only on women’s deaths while ignoring the normalisation of men’s killings is to miss the bigger picture.

Every life lost is a tragedy. Every murder is a failure of our society. We must fight for a South Africa where no one - man, woman, or child - is disposable.

The deaths of Tsontso and Kokozi remind us that violence is not just statistics, it is personal. It is the empty chair at the dinner table, the child crying for a mother who will never return and the sibling haunted by memories of laughter now silenced.

It is grief that never fades, anger that never subsides and pain that never heals. But it must also be the catalyst for change. We cannot allow their deaths to be in vain. We must demand a society where life is cherished, where killers are held accountable, and where children can grow up free from fear.

The question is whether we will continue to normalise the bloodshed or whether we will rise to stop it. The answer lies in our collective will to confront violence in all its forms, to refuse to accept murder as inevitable and to fight for a future where every life matters.

Only then will we truly honor the memory of Tsontso, of Kokozi - the 9 women whose bodies have been found in Ekurhuleni - and countless other South Africans whose lives were stolen - by standing together and working as communities, as men and women, to protect and uplift one another.

The story was first published in Sunday Independent and IOL.

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By Shaun Fuchs, Founder & CEO of Centennial Schools

Young entrepreneurs are increasingly using innovation and digital tools to respond to real-world challenges, rather than simply creating products to sell.

UNDP research shows how young founders are using innovation and digital tools to respond to challenges in areas such as education, healthcare, inclusion, and local economic development, while Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports that 84% of early-stage entrepreneurs consider social and/or environmental impact when making business decisions.

In this model, the opportunity lies in identifying an unmet need and developing a solution that creates value for customers, communities or both.

At the same time, digital connectivity is making it possible for small business owners to reach customers, partners, mentors, and investors beyond their immediate communities. OECD research into the digital transformation of SMEs notes that online platforms are supporting innovation, customer reach, and enhanced access to both regional and global markets.

This changes what entrepreneurship education should aim to achieve. The emphasis needs to move from learning about entrepreneurship to learning through it.

Teaching students how to write a business plan or calculate profit remains useful, but it is no longer enough. Schools should create opportunities for students to identify problems, test ideas, work through setbacks, understand customers, and refine solutions.

The experience of Centennial Schools student, 16-year-old Onalerona Tsiane, provides a useful example. She and her sister founded TeeSisters: a party balloon business that ultimately proved unprofitable.

This failure did not end their entrepreneurial journey, however. It became part of the learning process through which they identified a different opportunity, and they now run a viable flowers and personalised gifting business.

Their experience also evolved beyond selling products. Through TS Institute of Young Entreprenuers, an initiative they created to teach young people basic entrepreneurial skills, the sisters identified youth unemployment as a problem they wanted to address. This year, they took that mission to the SAGE Global competition in Vietnam, reaching the global top nine and winning two Sustainable Development Goal awards.

The significance of this journey is not the competition result alone. It demonstrates how entrepreneurship can move from an individual business idea towards identifying a wider problem and developing a response to it.

Schools should therefore create learning environments where curiosity is rewarded, questions are investigated, and students have ownership of the process. Project-based learning can be particularly powerful because it requires students to research, make decisions, collaborate, solve problems, and take responsibility for an outcome.

Entrepreneurship education consequently has a broader purpose than creating future business owners. It should help students become people who can recognise opportunities, respond constructively to uncertainty and turn ideas into useful solutions.

Schools shouldn’t simply add entrepreneurship as a subject and leave it there. There is significant value in complementing classroom learning with mentorship and practical entrepreneurship programmes that give students the opportunity to apply what they learn.

Centennial Schools’ annual entrepreneurship programme helps students gain real-world business experience by developing and managing sustainable ventures within the school’s supportive environment.

Ultimately, the goal is not to make every student an entrepreneur. It is to ensure that students leave school with the confidence, curiosity, and practical problem-solving abilities to create value, whether they ultimately build a business, join an organisation, or pursue a path that has not yet been imagined.

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By Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School.

Something is beginning to change in the way South Africa thinks about opportunity. It is visible in arguments over jobs, immigration and procurement, and now in the growing scrutiny of foreign academics at public universities. These debates arise in different institutions but increasingly revolve around who should occupy positions for which too many people are competing.

Persistent economic stagnation is changing the political meaning of transformation. Because opportunities are not expanding fast enough, transformation is increasingly becoming a contest over whose claim should take priority within the opportunities that already exist.

The debate over foreign academics reveals a deeper contradiction: localisation can redistribute positions to South Africans while weakening the expertise required to produce the South African academics who should occupy more of them in future.

South Africa entered the second half of 2026 with an official unemployment rate of 33.6%. This figure cannot tell us whether a foreign professor displaced a South African candidate, but it describes the wider economy in which competition for professional positions occurs. Universities have expanded qualifications and aspirations, while the economy has struggled to generate comparable opportunities.

A foreign academic makes this structural problem politically visible because slow growth and weak labour absorption offer no identifiable competitor to someone seeking an academic career. An economic problem can consequently acquire a distributional interpretation, shifting attention away from why opportunities are limited and towards who receives them.

However, foreign appointments can involve genuine displacement, and universities should justify international appointments where suitable domestic expertise exists. Public universities also have an obligation to develop South African academics rather than rely indefinitely on imported expertise.

South Africa does not start from nothing in this regard. The national government already funds programmes such as the New Generation of Academics Programme, the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme, the University Staff Doctoral Programme and the Future Professors Programme to develop the domestic academic pipeline.

The relevant question is therefore not whether South African academic capacity is being developed, but how that investment can be strengthened by expertise already available within the global academic system.

Localisation determines who occupies existing opportunities, while development determines how many opportunities can exist. A country can make significant progress on the first while making almost none on the second.

Universities complicate this distinction because academics do more than occupy jobs. A foreign professor can train South African scholars, build research capacity and connect them to international networks.

Candidates may compete for one post, but the expertise brought into that position can create capability far beyond it. Transformation should therefore be judged not only by who holds academic positions today, but also by whether universities are expanding the domestic capability needed to fill them tomorrow.

Localisation becomes self-defeating when representation advances faster than the academic system can reproduce expertise. More South Africans may occupy academic positions today, but the costs may emerge later through weaker doctoral supervision, diminished research capacity and fewer opportunities for younger academics to acquire specialised expertise.

This creates an asymmetry in institutional accountability. A university can be questioned today for appointing a foreign professor, while no comparable moment of accountability exists for the expertise it decides not to recruit.

The first decision has an identifiable beneficiary and an immediate political constituency, while the consequences of the second are dispersed among future students, research programmes and academics who may never know what capability was absent.

The time horizons are equally unequal. Localising an appointment produces an immediate and measurable change in representation, while building academic capability can require a generation of postgraduate training, supervision, publication and institutional learning.

Political pressure therefore favours outcomes that can be demonstrated now, even when a university’s developmental obligations require investments whose beneficiaries will become visible only years later.

Greater political scrutiny has already made international recruitment a more cautious institutional choice. Universities do not need to be instructed to become more conservative in their appointments.

Selection committees anticipate the questions that will follow, and institutions learn which decisions are easier to defend. Formal policy can remain unchanged while the incentives beneath it shift. The consequences will emerge later, when the expertise not recruited today manifests as missing supervision, diminished research capacity and absent academic networks tomorrow.

The more consequential change may occur inside the university itself. When institutions begin making decisions according to what a constrained political climate can accommodate, rather than the capabilities they need to build, stagnation acquires an institutional life of its own. Universities then cease merely to endure the limitations of the country and begin to reproduce them.

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One of my biggest regrets in life is not being good at mathematics at school.

I struggled with maths and accounting. I feared my accounting teacher, who told me I was stupid. Over time, I came to detest both subjects. My parents could not afford extra tuition, so I had little opportunity to catch up.

I managed to pass, achieving a D in Mathematics on the standard grade and a D in Accounting on the higher grade in matric. There was always a real possibility that I would fail maths. I had no idea how algebra, geometry and numbers might one day be relevant to my life. I became a journalist and followed a path into the humanities.

What if someone had given me extra classes? What if mathematics had been demystified? Perhaps my life would have turned out differently.

More than 30 years later, I find myself wondering how many young people choose their futures based on what they could pass at school, instead of what they could become.

At a recent Council on Higher Education Research Colloquium, on ‘Shifting Participation Trends in South African Higher Education: Public and private higher education sector’, Prof Denyse Webbstock, senior director for institutional planning, evaluation and monitoring at the University of Johannesburg, highlighted the scale of learners’ poor performance in maths.

Of the approximately one million learners who started Grade 1 in 2010, only 34 451 – about 3% – achieved a Mathematics mark of 60% or higher in matric in 2021.

Those numbers should concern all of us.

Mathematics is a gateway subject. In fields such as engineering, medicine, accounting, computer science, and the physical sciences, mathematical performance can determine whether a young person can pursue a particular career.

This means that a child who falls behind at school may not simply be struggling with a subject. They may be losing access to an entire range of careers.

And the problem starts early. The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) painted a particularly sobering picture. South African Grade 5 learners scored an average of 362 points in mathematics, compared with an international average of 503, placing South Africa last among the participating education systems. Grade 9 learners fared somewhat better, with their average mathematics score rising from 389 in 2019 to 397 in 2023, but this remained well below the international average of 478.

This means that by the time a learner reaches matric, years of difficulties with foundational concepts may have accumulated. Sometimes a foundational concept was missed. Maybe nobody explained it in a way that made sense to that child. Sometimes a learner needs more time, more practice and someone who believes they can succeed.

Teachers, however, work under enormous pressure to cover the curriculum. If learners have not mastered an earlier concept, they cannot simply stop indefinitely to rebuild every foundation. The Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement does not allow teachers time to go back. The gaps can therefore become a chasm as learners progress.

One way to close the gaps is a national Mathematics and Science Mentoring Programme involving universities, retired academics, scientists, engineers, accountants, and experienced teachers. The aim would not be to replace teachers, but to augment them.

Imagine a retired mathematics professor spending two afternoons a week helping learners understand foundational concepts. An experienced teacher mentoring younger educators. An engineer running a Saturday problem-solving session. University students serving as tutors and mentors.

And why can’t mathematics be fun? Why can’t it involve puzzles, games, music, sport, experiments and real-life challenges?

Multiplication tables can become songs or rhythmic chants. Games can teach probability and mental arithmetic. Learners can use cricket averages, football statistics and running times to understand numbers. Cooking introduces fractions, ratios and measurement. Coding and robotics can make logic and problem-solving tangible.

Learners can measure trees, calculate distances and explore patterns outdoors. When learning is fun, children may remember lessons.

Mathematics should not simply be a collection of equations to memorise for an examination. It is a way of understanding the world.

A statistician can show a learner how numbers help us understand sport. An engineer can demonstrate how mathematics is used to design a bridge. An accountant can explain the mathematics behind financial decisions. A data specialist can show how mathematics connects to artificial intelligence.

Suddenly, mathematics is no longer an abstract subject in a textbook.

It becomes something alive.

Programmes already demonstrate what is possible. Universities and specialist organisations have developed mathematics clubs, competitions, teacher-development programmes, problem-solving initiatives and outreach activities. At Nelson Mandela University, the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre supports mathematics education through learner programmes and teacher development.

South Africa does not need yet another isolated programme. We need to ask whether the programmes, people and expertise that already exist can be connected, strengthened and taken to a much larger scale.

Universities are well placed to help. Imagine a network of Mathematics and Science Academies linked to universities and surrounding schools.

Universities could provide academics, retired scholars, student mentors, laboratories, digital resources, teacher development, and career exposure. Schools would provide learners, teachers, and an understanding of their communities. Government could provide coordination and funding. Business could contribute equipment, sponsorship and workplace exposure.

The objective would be bigger than improving examination results. It would be about changing a child’s relationship with mathematics and exposing them to a university.

South Africa needs young people who can work confidently with numbers, data, technology and scientific ideas. The world of work is changing rapidly, and mathematical and analytical skills are becoming increasingly important in fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data science to finance, engineering and technology.

The country cannot build a knowledge economy if we continually lose talented young people from the mathematics and science pipeline. We cannot expect to solve the continent’s complex challenges if we do not develop our own pool of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, researchers and technology specialists. We should be developing the intellectual capacity to solve our problems ourselves rather than continually relying on expertise developed elsewhere.

South Africa has thousands of retired academics, teachers, engineers, scientists, accountants and other professionals who have accumulated decades of knowledge.

What if some of our most experienced professionals became the people who helped a new generation fall in love with mathematics and science?

This would not be about asking retired people to work for free. Their knowledge has value. A well-structured national programme could provide stipends, training, and support while giving experienced professionals a meaningful way to contribute.

Perhaps most importantly, such a programme could help young people see themselves differently.

A child from an under-resourced school may never have met an engineer, scientist or mathematician. They may not know what these professionals do or imagine themselves occupying such spaces.

A mentor can change that. Sometimes a child doesn't need another textbook. Sometimes they need someone to say: “You can do this. You belong here. There is a world of possibilities beyond this classroom.”

Perhaps we can change life for the next generation.

South Africa does not simply need more mathematics teachers. We need a national effort to make mathematics fascinating, accessible and exciting – to develop a sense of wonder about numbers, patterns, science and the world around us.

Because perhaps the real question is not how many children can pass mathematics.

It is how many children might discover what they are capable of if we give them the chance.

As for me, I lost that opportunity, like several other generations.

We need the political will to kickstart this initiative.

©Higher Education Media Services.

South Africa has 28.9 million credit-active consumers. At March 2025, 10.4 million of them or 36% held impaired credit records. Over the same period in which the country expanded access to higher education faster than at almost any point in its democratic history, the national financial literacy scores, measured on the OECD’s standard instrument, fell from 55 out of a 100 in 2015 to 51 in 2023.

These facts are usually filed in different places. One with a credit regulator and the other with the education department. Although they belong together. A country may increase the number of graduates entering the labour market without improving their financial competence.

This is because higher education and financial literacy are not inherently linked. Obtaining a degree does not necessarily require students to understand how credit agreements work or how to manage credit responsibly.

Where financial decision making actually begins

For a large share of South African students, university is the first environment in which they hold money in their own name. In 2026, more than 1.2 million students were approved for NSFAS funding and allowances for accommodation, transport, food, and learning materials which flow directly to them.

This is a monthly income arriving in the hands of a cohort before they have the required financial skills to manage it, right at a time where they gain access to retail credit, buy-now later facilities and the full attention of the financial services marketing industry.

The assumption is, that competence arrives only later, a skill they will acquire naturally as they grow older. Although competence comes later, it comes at a cost measured in current market prices.

The first salary, first vehicle finance agreement and first investment scam are all effective teachers and expensive ones at that. A damaged credit record at age 22 restricts access to housing finance at 32.

The institutional gap in financial education

The usual explanation is oversight. It is not. It is arithmetic.

The current reality reflects a cohort where academic ability does not equal financial capability. South African university students, a group that by any measure is academically advantaged, only poses a moderate level of financial literacy.

South African universities are evaluated and funded partly through measurable outputs such as enrolment, graduate throughput and research outputs. What these measures do not capture is whether graduates leave university financially capable.

A student with strong financial literacy and one who graduates without the ability to understand credit or manage debt may both count equally as successful graduate outputs. Despite the substantial difference in their preparedness for financial life beyond university.

The result is a structural gap, student affairs that has access to students but no curriculum authority, while faculties have curriculum authority but have no mandate to provide financial education.

Therefore, provision depends on the goodwill of individual staff members and occasional external funding. This is the predictable output of a funding formula and institutions that do what they are paid to do. Emerging evidence shows that financial education causes measurable gains. The question is not whether it works, but whether we will fund it.

What a workable version looks like

This is what the Money Moves – University Students’ Money Matters workshop developed by North-West University, as part of Money Smart Week South Africa Campaign developed by National Treasury provides a practical example of how this gap can be addressed.

The design principle was to allow students to make financial decisions using daily scenarios. Working with a fixed budget, students allocated between necessities and wants and then saw how each decision foreclosed later options. Scenario exercises traced how modest differences in spending and saving compound over several years. The content was organised around four functions, earn it, manage it, protect it, grow it.

Prof Suné Ferreira-Schenk who led the collaboration, notes that the format offers rehearsal. Errors are made that cost nothing, rather than discovering the terms of trade of a credit agreement after signing it. One participant’s summary was more precise than most textbook definitions. “Saving is a habit that has to be developed before investing is possible”.

Reflecting on the workshop, students’ general feedback was strong, providing sound evidence of demand and engagement. It showed that there is both an appetite and a need for financial education that speaks directly to their everyday experiences.

The ask? A better integrated institutional design from both public and private sectors

For universities, financial literacy at the very least should be a designed component of the first-year experience not an optional extracurricular that competes with everything else in a student’s week.

Make it practical, construct a realistic monthly budget, analyse a payslip, build emergency funds and interpret credit agreements. Where student budgets are publicly funded, the case for pairing that transfer with the capability to manage it, is close to unanswerable.

For employers, graduate financial fragility does not stay outside the workplace. It arrives as payroll administration, absenteeism, early withdrawals from retirement savings and attrition among people that have no financial buffer. Firms already fund bursaries and corporate social investment in education, directing a portion toward financial capability at the front end, will undoubtedly be cheaper than managing the consequences at the back.

South Africa invests heavily in preparing young people for work. It invests almost nothing in preparing them for wages. A degree opens the door to a first salary. Whether that salary builds anything is determined by a set of skills we have decided, without ever quite deciding, not to teach.

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As more countries restrict social media access for children, should South Africa follow suit, or find a solution better suited to its own realities?

Australia has done it. Indonesia has followed, and the United Kingdom intends to do so from 2027. As governments move to keep children below a prescribed age off social media, South Africa faces the same difficult question: should it shut the door too?

Linique Hanekom, whose work at the North-West University’s (NWU’s) Centre for Health and Human Performance includes a special interest in neurodevelopmental disorders, early communication intervention, and language and specific learning disorders, believes the country should seriously consider an under-16 restriction.

She is careful, however, about what it should be called—and what it could accomplish.

“I would prefer the language of an ‘age restriction’ rather than simply a punitive ‘ban’,” she says. “I would not view a restriction as a complete solution. It should form part of a broader child-development and online-safety strategy involving parents, schools, government and technology companies.”

Australia became the first country to enforce a national minimum age of 16. Since 10 December 2025, designated platforms have had to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from creating or retaining accounts. The burden rests on the companies, not children or their parents. Indonesia subsequently began enforcing restrictions for users under 16, while the UK has announced that certain social media services will become unavailable to under-16s from spring 2027.

Hanekom says South Africa should study these approaches, not copy them blindly. Local policy would have to account for unequal access to technology, digital literacy, education, data costs and the reality that many children also go online to learn, create, find community and seek support. Age checks introduce privacy questions, while determined adolescents may simply circumvent them.

“A restriction without education, platform accountability and accessible alternatives is unlikely to be sufficient.”

The developmental concern reaches far beyond offensive content. For younger children, Hanekom says, real human interaction is the “developmental work”. Language is not learnt merely by hearing words on a screen. It develops through joint attention, taking turns, reading faces and body language, asking questions and repairing misunderstandings.

“The issue is not simply what a screen does to a child; it is what the screen may prevent the child from doing.”

That distinction is supported by research. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics found that greater programme viewing and background television exposure among children under six were associated with poorer cognitive outcomes. Age-inappropriate content and caregiver screen use during children’s routines were associated with poorer psychosocial outcomes. The study also found positive associations between co-use and cognitive outcomes, underscoring that context matters.

For older children, social media arrives while identity, emotional regulation and self-concept are still developing. It can intensify social comparison, fear of missing out, pressure to manufacture an idealised identity and cyberbullying, while algorithms can surface self-harm, eating-disorder, sexualised or violent material that children never sought.

Sleep is another casualty. Late-night use, notifications and the pull of endlessly refreshed content can make disengagement difficult. Poor sleep then affects attention, memory, learning, behaviour and emotional regulation. Highly stimulating platforms may also crowd out the experiences through which children practise patience, sustained attention, problem-solving and tolerance of boredom.

Unlike bullying, online abuse can follow a child home, continue around the clock and be broadcast to an enormous audience. Children may encounter grooming, scams, misinformation and harmful challenges. That is why Hanekom believes reporting channels must be visible and trusted, and children must know that discomfort is reason enough to approach an adult. Safety depends on keeping communication open, not access closed.

Protection, Hanekom argues, therefore requires more than policing a child’s handset. Parents can delay social media accounts, keep phones out of bedrooms at night, create technology-free family time and model the habits they expect. Schools can establish phone-free periods, teach media literacy and explain how algorithms and advertising influence behaviour.

Government should demand child-safe default settings, meaningful parental controls, stronger data protection, limits on contact from unknown adults, independent safety assessments and transparency about recommendation systems. Technology companies, she says, must reduce harmful content loops and manipulative design features.

“We need to move away from a model where children are expected to adapt to platforms designed primarily to maximise engagement.”

Hanekom does not want exhausted parents blamed for occasionally reaching for a screen while working, cooking, travelling or simply surviving a difficult day. Her message is practical rather than puritanical: children need sleep, play, movement, books, imagination, friendships, conversation and responsive adults more than they need another feed to scroll.

“Technology should become part of childhood without becoming a substitute for childhood.”

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