My one and a half week in South Africa
By Vadika
One of the questions that come to my mind is regarding the right that a person should get when they are born. Its the access of resources.
A lot has come to surface since I wrote my first blog. I have learned a lot about South Africa in the past week.
The people in South Africa are very jolly. No matter where, they are always making jokes and laughing and even dancing on streets. There is a certain maturity in attitude considering the situation they are in. It felt as if their difficult life condition was understood and they were over complaining about it and just want to live their day happily. I met some people who had travelled weeks to move from Somalia to South Africa with their kids and wife, using different methods of transportation just to live a better life. The apartheid is a big tragedy in the generations of the families living there. Leave alone the end of apartheid, the reverse apartheid has created but more stress with the caucasians in South Africa. There is no equality even now.
I had the opportunity to meet some of the most passionate people working very hard for South Africa. Through them, I was able to get knowledge of the big issues like Education, Energy and Health.
There are families which are being raised by older siblings in the house or grand parents because the parents passed away because of HIV/AIDS. These are interfering with the education of kids. Parent less families are pretty common because of less application of sex education and facility. There is a big scare of crimes because of unemployment and sickness.
Majority of the population cannot afford healthcare and 30% of population has HIV, 30% of people are unemployed. So if approximately 30% of the population is sick, how do you hire the same population and train them to work long term? It is a cycle and each aspect of this cycle needs a lot of work and innovation in an industry like South Africa. Although their Human Development Index has raised in the past few years, there are still issues with the system. Doctors cannot perform their practice without fearing litigations, the insurance prices are higher to cover litigation costs and this makes it difficult for poor people to be healthy. So, they are trying to introduce a system like Obamacare to be able to cover most of the people. The success of this plan is questionable in a country like South Africa
Energy helps the infrastructure on many large things like purifying water or running a gas stove or reading for school. Load shedding has major impact on productivity. You go to a restaurant and they don’t have coffee because of the coffee machine is down. So, even after having the resources to make the product, the products are not available. This makes the whole system halt and less efficient. No one would want to stop cooking in the middle because the stove runs on electricity.
Another bias that adds to my lookout is, I have only seen the well to do cities in South Africa, Johannesburg or Cape Town which are tourism and finance hubs. It might be easy for people to get jobs there and resources but we don’t know how easy it is in rural areas. 65% of the population of South Africa is urban. The rest seemed to be in the rural areas. I can imagine the number staying stable if more people from other countries were able to cross borders and get refuge in South Africa and stay there because it is one of the better countries in Africa. Considering how fast the economy needs to support the number of people it has, South Africa might need maybe something that would be a combination of policy transformation, numbers, strategy and innovation.
One of the questions that come to my mind is regarding the right that a person should get when they are born. Its the access of resources. A person is born in a developed or underdeveloped country should have the same access to basic resources. So that a person’s development has nothing to do with the condition of the country like Syria. But the systems of the World are not built to do that. I am sure if kids were given the same resources as any kid in Europe or US, they would perform equally well.