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16 August 2018 Photo Johan Roux
Teen motherhood is not childs play
Elgonda Bekker of the UFS School of Nursing is pictured with Gladys Magobe, one-day-old baby Neo, and Luvuyo Madasa, Executive Director at RelmagineSA and great-grandson of Nelson Mandela. They were recently involved in a Princess Gabo outreach programme in Thaba Nhchu.

To commemorate the Nelson Mandela Centenary, a group of delegates from the Bloemfontein community had the privilege to get a behind-the-scenes look at the Princess Project and got an idea of how teenagers are taught about planned parenthood. 

The Princess Gabo Foundation and the Responsible Reproductive Health Education Project (RRHEP) is a community service learning project at the University of the Free State (UFS) that forms part of the credit-bearing curriculum of final-year midwifery students in the Undergraduate Nursing programme and is done in cooperation with the office of Community Service Learning.

The big responsibility of having a baby

Every baby deserves a good start in life. Both Elgonda Bekker, coordinator of the UFS Midwifery Programme, and Prof André Venter, head of the UFS Paediatrics and Child Health School and founding director of MACAH (The Mother and Child Academic Hospital Foundation), emphasise the importance of the first couple of years of a baby’s life. 

Having a baby is definitely not child’s play and is a heavy burden on teenage mothers and fathers. As part of the Princess project learners are given a baby doll for one week – with the consent of their parents as the experience can be quite disruptive. UFS students then send cellphone messages to these “doll parents” from their “babies”. For example, “your baby is crying, your baby is hungry, your baby needs to go to the clinic, your baby needs a nappie change” … 24 hours a day.  

Stop teenage pregnancies

The project has been so successful that it achieved an almost zero pregnancy rate at the two schools that are part of the programme. “When we started in 2015, we would have been happy to have saved one girl from an unplanned pregnancy. The outcome astounded us.” When they are responsible for their baby dolls, learners are trained in sound parenting techniques that include breastfeeding, kangaroo care (where their dolls are tied to their chests), health, and life skills. To complement the school curriculum, scholars are required to work out a budget for the baby from a typical South Africa Social Security Agency grant. Not only does this teach them maths literacy, it also illustrates how expensive raising a baby is. 

Parenting is precious 


For Princess Gaboilelwe Moroka-Motshabi, the Princess Gabo Foundation is a calling. Prompted by her own pregnancy health issues, she was compelled to help alleviate the suffering of mothers and babies. Currently, her aim is to supply new mothers with a kangaroo care wrap that helps with infant health and improves mother and child bonding. The wrap, then, seems to not only benefit infants, but also helps empower teenagers to prevent unplanned pregnancies with the help of the foundation.

News Archive

Literacy Month fosters the love of reading
2017-09-19

Description: Literacy Month fosters the love of reading Tags: Literacy Month fosters the love of reading 

Vutivi Baloyi author of Keep Hoping with Neo Kgoroba
one of the co-authors of In Our Own Words.


Literacy Month is celebrated in September each year at the University of the Free State (UFS) with various activities that are academic and community related and aim to join different departments in collaborative efforts to carry forward an awareness of literacy and the joy of reading among learners. The UFS Sasol Library lined up a series of events to celebrate the month, one of them being the launch of two books on 14 September 2017.

Vutivi Baloyi is a UFS student who wrote a collection of poems at the age of 17 which were recently published in a book called Keep Hoping. The book was launched alongside In Our Own Words, a collection of narratives written by UFS students about university life and transitioning from township high schools to a different culture, society and community, and the challenges with which they are faced.

In their own words, they share incredible experiences
The launch was attended by learners from Christian Liphoko High School in Thaba Nchu as well as Moroka High School and others. The compilation of narratives by UFS students was done under the auspices of Prof Merridy Wilson-Strydom through the Enabling Success project in the Centre for Research in Higher Education. Prof Wilson-Strydom said the project, supported by the National Research Foundation, was a profound way of empowering students by bringing out the value of the stories of their life on campus as they saw them, with each student writing a chapter on a specific theme.

Students as change agents and community builders
The student authors spoke to their audience from the heart, sharing words of advice, especially to younger learners who are still in high school. This has sparked a desire for the beginning of collaborative programmes between the individual university students and high school learners who hail from Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu, highlighting the need for mentorship, life skills, academic improvement and an opportunity to give back. 

The event is also part of the ongoing Launch Your Own Book project that has grown in 2017 at the UFS Library under the leadership of Mr Marcus Maphile, Assistant Director: Library Marketing and Community Engagement. Literacy Month will be celebrated with more events in September such as a round-table discussion in collaboration with the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa (ANSAFA) on 20 September 2017 at the library, to discuss developing authors and the role of ANSAFA. More activities will include outreach and community engagement, with a visit to Christian Liphoko High School in Thaba Nchu on 21 September 2017.

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