Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 20, 2005
Claire Keeton, Johannesburg

For the first time last month Ramajela could afford a uniform and the school fees for Nthabiseng after the family finally received a foster-child grant.

Hunched in a chair, 58-year-old Ramajela says: "I am so happy I can buy a few things for her."

Ramajela and her husband, who earns R300 a month, have looked after their grandchild since her mother died when she was a toddler.

Community-based organisation Noah (an acronym of Nurturing Orphans of Aids for Humanity), helped Ramajela secure the R560 grant when she was still empty-handed two years after her application.

Another Noah beneficiary, Keitumetse Msimang, 17, sings and acts at the Soweto Ark Resource Centre with a baby on her hip.

Her mother died last month. Now her grandparents support her, her sisters of 13 and 11, her younger brother of eight and her infant.

Soweto Noah's Ark and Ntokozweni HIV/Aids Support Project manager Bongani Mashinini is assisting Msimang's grandmother to apply for a grant.

"It is difficult to get a foster-child grant, especially if you do not have the right documents," says Mashinini, who has almost 200 children visiting the centre daily.

Nationally, 299465 children were receiving foster-care grants by October 31 -- but, although the number of grants has soared from about 40000 in 2000, tens of thousands more are still waiting for assistance.

Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya has launched a campaign to fast-track foster-care placements and grants -- and last month urged government departments and civil society to take this up.

Following his call, civil society organisations are referring all orphans and vulnerable children to welfare organisations as well as the Social Development Department.

The department's chief director of communications, Lakela Kaunda, says that, as a result, "the demand for foster care is increasing daily".

She says magistrates are prioritising foster-care cases and conducting Saturday Children's Courts where large backlogs exist.

Helen Meintjes, HIV/Aids senior researcher at the University of Cape Town's Children's Institute, commends the government for expanding access to the grants.

But Meintjes and other children's rights researchers and groups challenge the strategy of using the labour-intensive foster-care system, which can cater only to a relatively small number of the vulnerable children needing assistance.

Instead, they support a universal child-support grant.

The foster-care system was developed before the HIV/Aids epidemic, and was designed to protect abused and neglected children. Meintjes says using the same system to care for orphans is inefficient because it:

Is cumbersome in that it involves social workers and the court in much investigation, paperwork and long-term monitoring;

Does not reach enough poor children, including those living with sick adults; and

Fails to reach abused children needing protection because of the massive backlogs that have built up.

"It would be impossible, even with vastly increased numbers of social workers and an improved court system, to get all orphaned children into foster care," says Meintjes.

The view that foster-care services are being squandered on poverty alleviation is shared by children's rights' campaigners, among them Childline national co-ordinator Joan van Niekerk: "We are wasting very precious, professional resources required for abused children. They are waiting in line with a backlog of 100000 cases."

She says one child has been waiting 16 months to be rescued after reporting abuse because social workers are overloaded.

"The child protection system is grinding to a halt trying to use [foster-grant] services for children who simply need food."

Yvonne Spain, director of Children in Distress (Cindi), confirms that there are serious bottlenecks.

Childline proposed a universal child support grant to Parliament, last year, and again this year. Cindi also backs a universal child-support grant and has "tackled government in meetings on this", says Spain.

But such a grant is not incorporated into the draft Children's Bill. The Bill does, however, make provision for a "court-ordered kinship care grant" for children not living with their biological parents.

The problem with the current child-support grant of R180 is that it is available only to caregivers of children under 14, who pass a means test.

Sunette Pienaar, CEO of Heartbeat, which works directly with about 5000 vulnerable children, says this is a problem for many of them.

The child-support grants, known as "Thabo Mbeki's payments", reach 6619154 children countrywide.

University of Stellenbosch development economist, Professor Servaas van der Berg, says the child-support grants have reduced poverty -- but he cautions that the massive increase in grants cannot carry on indefinitely.

051120
ST051104