Improving education outcomes and producing a skills revolution, as well as ensuring a healthy nation, are two of the key priorities of the sixth administration, as highlighted by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his 2019 state of the nation address (Sona). The complementarities between education and health are well documented: children who are healthy, stimulated and well-nourished from birth are better equipped to develop cognitively and learn than children who receive poor nutrition, are not stimulated often or suffer from poor health.

RESEP’s Servaas van der Berg and Ronelle Burger recently contributed to a Bureau for Economic Development (BER) report tracking the progress of the National Development Plan (NDP). The document measures the extent to which South Africa’s development objectives, as detailed in the NDP, have been achieved. 

To prevent children from falling behind in the developmental sequence of reading, a shared vision of what reading success looks like at each step is required. A multi-disciplinary team from SALDRU at UCT, RESEP at Stellenbosch University and NORC at the University of Chicago have collaborated to inform this shared vision through the establishment of benchmarks for foundational reading skills in three Nguni languages. The summary and technical benchmarking reports were recently launched by the Department of Education as part of their workshop on Reading Benchmarks for African Languages.

With the announced hard-lockdown in March 2020, and as with most other non-essential activities, all fieldwork at Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) was shutdown. However, researchers at RESEP were quick to realise that rapidly updated, accurate information on key outcomes such as unemployment, household income, child hunger and access to government grants would be of vital importance for sound decision making during a global pandemic.