Dear MTN, Vodacom and Cell C, in February of this year, Amnesty International released a report entitled:“For South Africa to comply with both its own constitutional and international human rights obligations with respect to education, major change is needed urgently,” executive director of Amnesty South Africa, Shenilla Mohamed, said at the time.
Most schools closed when the nation declared a state of disaster in March and, while private and well-resourced government schools were able to continue some semblance of teaching by moving online during lockdown, most of our country’s students were left to wait for their school’s doors to open again. By the end of the second week of June, many matrics across the country had returned to class; followed by Grades 11 and 10 just under a month later.
But what about the schools that haven’t had the means to have an online presence; such as the 18019 that don’t have a library? What of the 4358 that only have illegal, plain pit latrines or the 37 that have no sanitation facilities at all? I shudder to think how the 16 897 public schools that have no internet, the 239 that have no electricity, or the tens of thousands that were simply unable to facilitate online learning are going to adequately prepare their students in the time remaining.
But we’re not the only ones who’ve had this idea. In fact, the DBE has a published list of 351 educational websites that have applied to be zero-rated. Ours is one of them. And yet, despite our beginning the application process back in April, we are still waiting to be zero-rated by any of South Africa’s big three mobile network operators — and the same can be said for most of the other applicants.
to R80-billion for the six months ending June 30 and a data revenue increase of 16.7% because of lockdown — surely zero-rating a few websites to help our already crippled education system isn’t too much to ask?
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