by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Nov 28, 2025 | Child Protection Legislation & Child Rights, Children’s Online World
Behind the photo ops and ceremonial handovers at the G20 Social Summit was a fierce battle that nearly saw children’s voices silenced once again. Children had to fight to get a seat at the table. They don’t want symbolic participation, they want real power to “shape our world”, but the problem, says Robyn Wolfson Vorster, is that adults don’t want children to speak truth to power.
The 2025 G20 Social Summit ended in an unprecedented manner for South Africa’s children when, on World Children’s Day, 14-year-old Amogelang Mashele read out the summit declaration and 7-year-old Jordan Motshegoa ceremonially handed it to the president.
But the triumph concealed the fierce battle behind the scenes to get children a seat at the table, and how close they came to once again having their voices silenced.
The children’s declaration drafted at the end of the G20 Social Summit’s pre-summit includes content from 70 children from across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya who attended the summit in person along with those who participated virtually or provided content to the delegates through the children’s social media platforms which they cleverly used to crowd source input from diverse groups of children cutting across age, race, class and gender. They, in turn, represent approximately 2.3 billion children, more than a quarter of the world’s population.
It begins: “We, the children of the Children20, are speaking together from different countries, languages and backgrounds. We ask G20 leaders to hear us. The choices you make today will shape our lives tomorrow. We want to help build the world we will grow up in. We are not too young to understand. We are not too young to lead. And we are not too young to be included.”
Delegates debated the five thematic areas designated for the Social Summit – specifically, digital inclusion and safeguarding, trade, climate justice, finance and achieving the sustainable development goals and 2030 agenda. While the resultant conclusions are plainly stated (the declaration was written so that a 10-year-old could understand it), the content is far from basic. To quote one of the teens at the G20 summit: “We chose to avoid the complex and ambiguous language used by adults when they want to avoid accountability.”
It’s a clarion call to action.
The children call for an end to fraud, corruption and waste, for more funding for child-centred projects, for climate justice, trade that protects child rights, safe online spaces and tech that helps children grow rather than putting them in danger, more effective education, support for children with special needs, combatting of hunger, child participation in policy changes around all spheres of life that affect children, strong safeguarding and honest accountability. Individually, they opposed xenophobic education policies, and identified the gender-based violence crisis, statutory rape and mental health as life-defining challenges.
Adding their lived experiences to the discussions, a teenage girl from rural South Africa described “the weight of danger online feeling heavier than my schoolbag”. A boy from Zimbabwe noted that hunger “steals your decisions before it steals your strength”.
They also asked for children to be equal partners in decision-making and a child representative in parliament, quite literally a seat at the table. The challenge to government leaders and even other sectors in civil society is, “nothing about us without us”. This is boldly encapsulated in declaration’s concluding paragraph: “We don’t want symbolic participation, we want real power to shape our world.”
And herein lies the problem, because while many in authority are comfortable with child participation in principle and mindful of the photo ops their presence brings, they are less willing to allow children to direct the process, to disrupt agendas, to fire adult facilitators, to find ways to include even the youngest children, and to speak truth to power.
It was exactly what they did. Children challenged the agenda of the pre-summit, requesting additional time to debate the themes and come up with solution-based statements. At the Social Summit, they questioned the relegation of their side events to the furthermost corner of the property, they insisted on including even the youngest children (who created the thematic posters that famously made it onto the stage during the declaration handover), and asked uncomfortable questions. For example, when told by an African Union representative that they had both rights and responsibilities, one of the
children asked how they could learn responsibilities when adults consistently withhold agency and authority from them.
Authenticity, emotion, and genuineness
Respectful and mindful of protocol throughout, their approach was so clearly lacking in artifice and staidness that Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni quipped during the launch of the Unicef State of the World’s Children report after the final event, that during the handover of the declaration the children had “programme-directed themselves”. Which they had.
They ad-libbed some of the formalities, took selfies with the president, and when little Jordan was too shy to hand over the declaration to the president, it was the children who, much to the seeming delight of the president, took his hand and coached him in what to do.
Without trying, they added an authenticity, emotion and genuineness to what, as a civil society-led initiative, should never have become a stolid event. But it was this lack of decorum, the age and boldness of the participants that resulted in
the most pushback from those in authority.
As one member of the children’s support team explained, even those tasked with forming policy on children’s behalf seem to find child-led dialogues and their voices confronting or uncomfortable.
And it was always going to be an uphill battle. Children20 had its genesis during the Brazil presidency on the G20 in 2024, but despite the recommendation for child participation, the Brazilians, who undoubtedly had their hands full institutionalising the voices of civil society in the G20 by means of the Social Summit, were not able to get it ratified. The upshot was that South Africa entered the G20 presidency cycle with the role of children uncertain.
Not only was the Children20 not recognised as a formal grouping in the Social Summit, but the Youth20, which is a formally ratified grouping, chose to produce a chairperson’s report this year rather than a formal declaration because, as group’s sherpa attested, they have yet to have any of their G20 recommendations implemented.
Nonetheless, the South African children’s sector (through the South African National Child Right’s Coalition, Unicef, Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Save the Children, Childline, Hold My Hand, DGMT and others) began lobbying for recognition of a formal children’s engagement group immediately after the handover. It was a request that was denied. Organisers were forced to proceed without it.
Despite its lack of a formal mandate, the sector began to mobilise children to provide input, forming a WhatsApp group amongst the children to get them talking, creating and distributing child-friendly content and planning for a pre-summit (amongst the many barriers to children’s input, the summit was scheduled for November in the middle of their
exams).
‘The future is our voice. Our voice is now’
It was this pre-summit that produced the Children’s Declaration, but despite tireless efforts from the children’s sherpa and organising committee of Children20, children nonetheless entered into the Social Summit without a designation, with their contributions falling out of category.
The relegation of their engagements to the furthermost corner of the event, despite the gravitas of contributions from the AU, Sherpa of Y20, the Brave Movement and others, was proof of their uncertain status and organisers were fearful that they would end up being a side event as they had in Brazil.
Moreover, despite the conference organisers stating publicly that children would hand over the G20 Social Summit declaration, there was immense pushback, both from formally designated groups and from officials worried that the children may be embarrassing, wouldn’t understand or be able to answer questions, or be unable to acquit themselves
well. It was a battle to the end.
It was why there wasn’t a dry eye amongst the adults in the Children20 team when the children handed over the summit declaration. Far from being a clever PR stunt, doffing a hat to the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, it was a triumph in the ongoing fight to get children seen and their voices heard.
Equally significant is news that the hope expressed by 16-year-old Sesona Qhimngqoshe, a member of the Children’s Parliament, will be fulfilled. She asked the G20 leaders to officially make Children20 part of the formal engagements in each G20 so that the children of South Africa can hand over to the children of the United States.
The children’s 2025 input has been officially recognised and they’ve been asked to submit their participation reports to the G20 sherpa. While uncertainty remains about how the United States will lead the 2026 G20, formal registration of the Children20 will occur prior to next year’s summit. The upshot is that children’s input will now be harder for those
in authority to ignore.
To quote Sesona, it’s proof that for children “anything is possible if you put your mind to it”.
It’s fitting that the children should have the last word. The Children’s Declaration concludes: “Listen to us, work with us, build the future with us. The future is our voice. Our voice is now.” Are we listening?
Robyn Wolfson Vorster is a child protection advocate and founder of For the Voiceless.
First published in News24 on 28.11.2025. To cite, please attribute to Robyn Wolfson Vorster from For the Voiceless and note that the article was first published in News24.
by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Jun 6, 2023 | Child Abuse, Child Protection Legislation & Child Rights, Health and Hunger
It’s the end of another Child Protection Week, proof positive of a government without a cohesive funded strategy for child protection, or anything related to children, and one seemingly unaware of the extent of the crisis.
Listen to this article: BeyondWords
If you recognised the name of government’s 2023 Child Protection Week campaign: “Let’s all protect children through Covid-19 and beyond”, it’s because it was the title of the 2022 campaign, and the 2021 one, and the 2020 one. The content on the official government website is also a copy and paste from the last three years.
It’s why when asked in an eNCA interview at the launch of the week if Covid was the most critical challenge for children, the Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu accurately replied that the campaign was developed while Covid was still a factor.
She did stress however that the “and beyond” allowed room for the week to address all the many ills our children are currently facing.
While that’s apposite, the department could have steered clear of any Covid references, given that government missed many vital opportunities to protect children during the pandemic and that children continue to be affected.
The psycho-social impact of the pandemic is still largely unmanaged. Government has also been slow to acknowledge its role in the mass closure of early childhood development centres and its failure to recognise increases in the numbers of orphans and abandoned children, or respond meaningfully to escalations in teen pregnancies, violence and exploitation, or those suffering from malnutrition and stunting.
Consequently, it might have been opportune for the Department of Social Development (DSD) to revert to its pre-Covid campaign title: “Let’s protect children to move South Africa forwards”, notable because it links the well-being of children to the future of the country.
According to activists and academics, who stress the importance of extending child protection to the prevention of a myriad of adverse childhood experiences such as hunger, poverty, poor housing, inadequate early childhood development and schooling, abandonment, deprivation of family care, violence, homicide, and a lack of opportunity, economic mobility and social capital, the picture is a bleak one.
How big is the problem?
The shadow report submitted to the African Union by the South African National Child Rights Coalition (SANCRC) and statistics and analysis compiled by the Children’s Institute, both drawing from multiple global and local studies, reveal how dire our children’s situation is.
In 2020, 62.1% of South African children lived in multiple deprivation poverty, measured by their access to combined services and support: income support, health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, and protection.
Historically marginalised children experience much higher deprivations. In 2022, more than a third of children in South Africa lived below the food poverty line of R663 per month. This has been exacerbated by below-inflation increases for the Child Support Grant (CSG), leaving families poorer and children hungrier.
The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group found that in May 2023 the CSG (R500) was 25% below the food poverty line (R663) and 45% below the average cost to secure a basic nutritious diet for a child (R901,19).
Of every 1,000 children born in South Africa, 28 die before their fifth birthday. Half of all child deaths in hospitals are associated with malnutrition. Only 23% of children between six and 23 months receive a minimum acceptable diet.
Further, 30% of boy children and 25% of girl children under the age of five are stunted, meaning that they cannot reach their full growth and development potential because of the irreversible physical and cognitive damage caused by persistent nutritional deprivation. Stunted children are more vulnerable to disease and cannot learn effectively, are more likely to drop out of school, struggle with unemployment and live in poverty as adults. Stunting exacerbates the triple challenge of unemployment, poverty and inequality that the government keeps promising to eradicate.
The Thrive by Five Index indicated that 57% of children attending an Early Learning Programme (ELP) were not on track for cognitive and, or physical development.
The World Bank’s Human Capital Index from 2021 showed that children born in South Africa today will only develop to 43% of their potential, compared to a global average of 56%. A 2015 study by Save the Children South Africa estimated that this loss of human capital equated to roughly R238-billion (about 6% of that year’s GDP).
In 2016, only 51% of 20–24-year-olds had completed matric or its equivalent. Less than 20% of children in no-fee schools achieved above the lowest international benchmark in maths.
Further, the quality of this schooling is so poor. Children who received 10.2 years of schooling have effectively only received an estimated 5.6 years. The recent Pirls report indicated that in 2021, 81% of Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language. Accompanying analysis showed that many children lost up to a year of learning during the pandemic.
A year following the pandemic’s end, only the Western Cape has a learning catch-up plan.
A 2016 Optimus study found that 42% of children had experienced some form of maltreatment (whether sexual, physical, emotional or neglect), while 82% experienced victimisation (whether criminal or exposure to family or community violence).
Further, 34.4% of adolescents reported having been hit, beaten, kicked or physically hurt by an adult caregiver over their lifetime. Approximately one in every three adolescents (girls and boys) have experienced some form of sexual abuse. Community studies show far higher rates of exposure and trauma, 99% in Soweto, and 80% in Khayelitsha.
The Birth to Thirty study published in 2022 assessed a broad range of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) from physical and sexual abuse to exposure to community violence and poverty. Results indicate that 87% of children in the sample were exposed to four or more adverse childhood experiences, and that by age 18, only 9% of the sample hadn’t been exposed to a single ACE.
Some contributing factors to the problems
Civil society contends that historical challenges have been exacerbated by government’s evident failure to prioritise, plan or budget for the protection of children.
Despite government’s tacit acceptance that prioritising children is essential for the country, government’s Medium-Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) 2019–2025 which spotlights women, youth and those with disabilities, makes no mention of children.
In addition, the president’s 2023 State of the Nation Address (Sona) only included children in the context of early childhood development and gender-based violence (where violence against them is conflated with that against women, despite women often being the perpetrators).
Further, the president promised in Sona that grants would be increased to cushion the poor against inflation.
However, the national budget failed to respond to the increasing gap between the Food Poverty Line and the value of the CSG, especially as food inflation rates continue to be almost double the CPI inflation, increasing to 13.8% in January 2023. Treasury again only committed to below-inflation increases in the CSG and Foster Care Grants (FCG).
The budget made no further mention of children or their development.
While the under-resourced and inept DSD is “in the forefront” of child protection, children’s services collectively are fragmented across multiple government departments including health, home affairs, education, and justice, with an evident lack of coordination, oversight and planning from the presidency.
What can be done?
Activists suggest the following:
1 Elevate children to a strategic priority and plan, budget and resource the sector accordingly
Civil society recommends that the state, at the highest levels of the Presidency, premiers’ and mayors’ offices, acknowledge that to implement the country’s treaty responsibilities and uphold its Constitution, South Africa needs a national child rights governance system overseen by an effective and resourced Office on the Rights of the Child (ORC) located in the Presidency, but not in the Department of Women.
The achievement of children’s rights to equality, to survive and to develop to their full potential should be recognised as national development priority in the Medium-Term Strategic Framework and included in government’s Sona and Sopa addresses.
The Ministry of Finance should recognise children’s development as a national priority and budget accordingly.
Improving the outcomes for children should be monitored and authorities held accountable for failure to realise specific outcomes.
2 Eliminate ‘the slow violence of child hunger’
This requires government to recognise that it can no longer economise on the CSG or ignore the cost to the country of keeping the quantum of the grant, which studies have shown contributes to better health, nutrition and educational outcomes for children, below the food poverty line. This economising, according to Katherine Hall and Paula Proudlock of the Children’s Institute, is achieved by taking: “food from the mouths of children.”
Further, Dr Chantell Witten states that government needs to address its macro food policy. She says that in South Africa, retailers are making profits against the hunger curve. The Grow Great zero-stunting campaign has identified 10 nutritious foods for child development. To dramatically minimise stunting, it is campaigning to make these 10 foods (which include eggs, peanut butter, full cream milk, dried beans, tinned fish and bread) 20% cheaper by asking retailers to waive their markups and government to subsidise these products.
Moreover, government must take its constitutional duty to provide food for learners through the National School Nutritional Programme (NSNP) seriously. Global studies show how school feeding programmes can improve school attendance, and children’s ability to learn. The NSNP supplements the nutrition of half of all children in South Africa.
Following the closure and partial reinstatement of the NSNP during lockdown, the high court confirmed that the right to basic education and the child’s right to basic nutrition is an unqualified right, and asked for “the justice of eating”. It ordered the Department of Education to reinstitute the programme for all 9.6 million children regardless of if they’d returned to school.
Yet, in April and May 2023, more than a million children in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape went hungry after a change to the procurement system in KZN and failure to pay subsidies timeously in the EC.
Heart-breaking headlines reported children crying from hunger, schools closing early because children could not learn, and children begging for food on the streets. According to Section 27, these failures “pointed to broader problems with the funding and administration of the NSNP.”
Advocacy groups note that the executive and Parliament’s response holding the respective provincial departments of education accountable was heartening, but this was another graphic example of government indifference, resulting in what the high court judge called, “the obscenity of hunger”.
While the NSNP is a priority, food for children in early childhood development is not. The government subsidy to registered ECDs to prepare food for children is a paltry R6.80 per child per day. More troubling, only 33% of ECDs, 627,000 children, receive government subsidies, so most under-fives (the age when stunting occurs) don’t receive government subsidies for food. Both the registration requirements and quantum of the subsidy need urgent attention.
Another strategic intervention against stunting is to extend the CSG to pregnant women to ensure adequate nutrition during pregnancy. A 2021 Embrace, Grow Great, and Stellenbosch University study found that pregnant women in the poorest communities were going hungry, experiencing poor mental health and economic insecurity, which was negatively affecting their children’s development and extending intergenerational cycles of poverty.
The study showed that extending grants to pregnant women would increase the grant budget by a mere 1.5% and have a significant impact on infant health and development.
3 Focus on prevention of violence and child homicide
Extending the CSG to pregnant mothers is also critical to minimise the number of mothers abandoning their babies for financial reasons.
In addition, government needs to be held accountable for its unwillingness to legalise the safe relinquishment of babies through baby savers. Unsafe infant abandonment, often the only option in the absence of safe relinquishment, leads to psychological and physical scarring, ongoing trauma, and frequently results in death.
In 2021, civil society attempted to introduce amendments to the Children’s Act to legalise safe relinquishment, but was opposed by the DSD who considered the life-saving amendments “unconstitutional”. As government stonewalls, more children die.
Moreover, studies have shown that while government is pouring money into policing and the criminal justice system, less than 1% of the DSD’s annual budget is spent on violence prevention or early intervention despite evidence that preventing children from witnessing and experiencing violence stops the cycle of deprivation and disadvantage.
A redirection of funds to violence prevention and family strengthening initiatives is critical for children’s protection.
4 Facilitate safe family care
In 2020, South Africa had 2.9 million orphans and by December 2022, a further 168,200 had lost their primary caregiver to Covid. While many orphans are in safe family care, they are, by definition, at greater risk of poverty, abuse, and exploitation.
Yet, adoption rates declined to a paltry 849 in 2020/2021, a 65% drop in the last 10 years, the foster care system has been broken for more than a decade, and without sufficient alternative family care, plans to deinstitutionalise children present a real danger.
Further, while the department prioritises family care for children, it’s less willing to fund parenting programmes and other resources necessary to make those families a safe space. This, despite children emphasising the need for their parents to get skills and psychosocial support to parent them more effectively.
5 Consistently and adequately resource the helpers
Violence prevention for children requires the active and engaged presence of social workers in communities. But although the National Development Plan calls for 55,000 social workers by 2030, in March 2023, Minister Zulu reported that there were only 22,000 social workers employed in public service (across all sectors). The department aims to grow the number to 31,744 by 2030 at an estimated cost of R9-billion. It’s positive, but even if achieved, that’s still 23,256 social workers too few.
The situation for NGOs is even more desperate. In a Western Cape Child Protection Alliance press statement released for Child Protection Week 2023, 70% of the child protection services in the province claim that although NGOs in the Western Cape provide 55% of child protection services, their subsidies have remained stagnant for the last five years, despite inflation. The upshot is that funding has diminished by 20-25% during the period.
In Gauteng, analysis done by activist Lisa Vetten revealed that its 2023 budget contained a massive 31.4% drop in funding to social welfare services including a 21.1% budget cut to programmes working with families, and a 4.6% drop in funding to community care programmes. Child protection organisations were obligated to provide the same services to the same numbers of children with as much as a 60% cut in salaries.
The Gauteng premier walked back the changes following a national public outcry, but the drastic cuts are not unprecedented and NGOs hit the headlines complaining of late or non-payment of subsidies resulting in increasing risk of NGO closures at the beginning of every financial year.
Such closures are disastrous given government’s lack of resources and its cost structures, on average two to three times higher than those of non-profits. The effect would be increasing non-delivery of services to children, incomprehensible if child protection is indeed a priority.
6 Recognise the role of education in child protection
No one questions the role of education in lifting children out of poverty with its concomitant risks of exposure to violence and adverse childhood experiences. In addition, keeping children in school should be a critical priority since, “without the protection afforded by educational systems, including access to school feeding programmes, millions of children, particularly girls, are at higher risk of violence, exploitation, neglect, malnutrition and online abuse”.
Drop-out rates are therefore concerning. While the department lauded the 65% of learners who completed a matric or TVET national certificate in 2022, MPs paint a different picture. In Gauteng alone, 260,000 learners did not return to school in 2022. Parliamentarians believe that for children to stay in school, government needs to “build more schools, improve teaching and learning to a better quality, give schools and educators the best tools to make a success of our children’s future.” And, we could add, fix broken infrastructure in the existing schools.
But, although government allocated R22-billion to basic education in the most recent budget, statistics show that in real terms the percentage of GDP allocated to education has dropped from 20.5% of GDP in 2001 to 18.42% in 2023.
7 Elevate the voices of children
During Child Protection Week media briefings, the minister emphasised the importance of hearing children’s voices, which the department does primarily through the Nelson Mandela Children’s Parliament. While it’s progress for government to get feedback from children, there’s no process to ensure that input from the children’s parliament affects government policy or practices.
Nor is the children’s parliament representative. Conspicuous by their absence are the voices of the stunted children forced to drop out of school because they don’t have the cognitive ability to cope with the rigours of learning, and those whose caregivers can only afford to feed them one meal a day because the grant doesn’t stretch to the end of the month.
Nor do we hear from the children who left school to beg for food when the NSNP meals didn’t arrive, or those who go hungry every second day because their province’s NSNP meals are so small and insufficient that “stokvelling” them with a friend and only eating twice a week seems better than eating too little every day.
Absent are the stories of the physically or sexually abused or abandoned children who don’t always live to tell them.
Like the four-year-old toddler from Durban whose mother tied her hands with tape and then drowned her in a bucket full of water because she was “difficult and troubling her”, or the seven- and nine-year-old girls from Port Shepstone who were raped by their 19-year-old brother and step-father; the girls whose mother hit them and then bathed them repeatedly to remove the evidence after they told her about the abuse.
We’re lacking the voice of the Grade 10 pupil whose teacher asked her and other learners for sex to improve their marks, and the children, aged six and 14 who were murdered and left in a burning house by their mother’s ex-boyfriend.
And poignantly, we cannot hear the voice of a tiny newborn whose mother abandoned him in a pit latrine in an informal settlement in Pietermaritzburg shortly after his birth. His rescue by members of the community was heralded as a miracle, but he died in hospital the following day.
Responding to his death, a representative of the DSD inadvertently identified the root problem when he said that “the incident is extremely troubling, especially now during Child Protection Month. What is strange is some people in our communities are aware of what the department is capable of doing.” He then went on to tell women to take their unwanted children to “social workers, police stations and clinics so they can get assistance.”
It was said without irony, despite the department’s fierce opposition to safe relinquishment laws that would allow desperate women to relinquish their unwanted children without the consequence of being turned away or risking arrest, and despite the department reputedly often doing very little to help.
At the heart of the issue is that while it is “in our hands to stop the cycle of neglect, abuse, violence and exploitation of children”, government cannot be outraged when a tragedy occurs during Child Protection Week when it failed to acknowledge or use careful strategy, planning and resourcing to eliminate the root cause in the remainder of the year.
Nor, if it was honest, should the DSD’s messaging champion the Constitution or the rights of the child. While it is true that “children in South Africa live in a society with a Constitution that has the highest regard for their rights and for the equality and dignity of everyone” and that “protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is not only a basic value, but also an obligation clearly set out in Article 28 of the South African Constitution,” there is no dignity in children starving to death, or drowning in a pit latrine unacknowledged and unaided by the authorities whose job is to protect them.
Without effective support at the highest level, Child Protection Week is analogous to sweeping leaves in a cyclone.
Unquestionably it’s time to pack away the pins and campaign promises and instead build children’s rights into the country’s strategic plans, budgets and structures, and resource it accordingly. Only then should we really claim to be upholding children’s rights to protection from violence, their right to dignity, and claim that we are acting in their best interests. DM
First published in the Daily Maverick: 06.06.2023
To cite please use the author’s name, the year of publication, the title of the article, name of publication, date of publication.
