Sibongile Mkhabela, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, gave a lunchtime talk about the mission of her organization and the present state of South African children’s issues Thursday at the John Hope Franklin Center.
“The majority of children in South Africa are invisible,” said Mkhabela, a Joel L. Fleishman Civil Society Fellow in the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. “Until they smell, we don’t know they exist.”
Other major challenges facing NMCF include drug abuse, health issues like HIV/AIDS, school dropouts and a struggling economy that isn’t necessarily ready to absorb students that do graduate high school, Mkhabela said.
The NMCF bases its goals on goelama, a word that means “to nurture, care and protect those that are vulnerable in society,” and focuses on the improvement of the well-being, education and leadership skills of poor children. Mkhabela says she is working with 250,000 “moving targets,” citing the difficulty of long-term investment in one group of people because children grow up. Her organization zeroes in on children at a young age and keeps track of them until their 23rd birthday.
A small group with a range of ages and academic interests came to hear Mkhabela. Professors of public policy, political science and romance studies, interspersed with graduate students and undergraduates, heard a detailed and first-hand prognosis of children’s issues in South Africa.
Catherine Admay, visiting lecturer in public policy and a member of the Southern Africa Faculty Concilium at Duke, said she shares a strong bond with Mkhabela. “She is an extraordinarily interesting and charismatic person. We’re lucky to have her on campus,” she said.
Mkhabela, a member of the Soweto generation of 1970s South Africa, recalls when, on June 16, 1976, South African police opened fire on children protesting schools teaching in Afrikaans rather than in English. Following that incident, Mkhabela spoke out against government policies and was charged with sedition and sent to jail for 23 months. She said she has always believed that, with regard to civil liberty, “there is something in there that is worth fighting for.”
After she was released, she became a paralegal and sought to connect the more affluent white lawyers with the struggles of the poor. Years later, she received a degree in Social Work, Psychology and Industrial Sociology from the University of Zululand in South Africa. The United Nations Development Program sought her to help open an office in South Africa and to scout for possible policy proposals in community development, children and social services.
Mkhabela went on to hold senior positions in the United Nations Education Program in South Africa and the South African Counsel of Churches. Mkhabela will finish out her month at Duke as a Fleishman Fellow Oct. 29.
She is interested in the American perspective on how best to help children in South Africa. She stressed the importance of connecting groups to cultivate new ideas and solutions. “We’ve got to get out of the comfort zone of whatever we have always been doing,” Mkhabela said. “We need a new perspective.”
Her project at Duke is titled “Ten Years of Democracy in South Africa-—Shifts in the Non-Governmental Organization Sector: Rethinking the Resource Mobilization Agenda for Community Organization.”
Mkhabela reserves a special passion for her work with children. “[The children that the fund benefits] may be hungry and they may be orphaned and they may be poor,” she said, “but they can smile and they can laugh and they can dance.”
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