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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

Universities can contribute to economic transformation
2010-01-27

At the lecture were, from the left: Prof. Neil Heideman (Acting Dean: Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences), Prof. Hartmut Frank (University of Bayreuth, Germany), Prof. Bianchi and Prof. Jan van der Westhuizen (professor in Chemistry at the UFS).
Photo: Mangaliso Radebe 


Universities have a role to play in economic transformation and industrial development according to Prof. Fabrizio Bianchi, the Rector of the University of Ferrara in Italy.

This was the core message of his lecture on the topic Globalisation, Agriculture and Industrial Development that he delivered at the University of the Free State.

He said after the collapse of the agricultural industry in Italy as a result of the subsidies that the farmers were receiving from the government, the university had to step in.

“This was meant to maintain high prices and maximize the production but in the long run this approach created problems because the farmers were no longer producing high quality products but large quantities in order to receive subsidies,” he said.

“The result was that the government itself had to destroy those poor quality products. This was a completely unreasonable way to manage the economy”.

He said they had to abandon that approach and concentrate on quality because they realized that Italy could not match the prices and the quantity, in terms of production, of countries like China and the USA.

He said “knowledge and human resources” were the key factors that could get them out of that crisis; hence they came up with what he called “the Made in Italy approach”.

“We were working on the idea that food is part of culture and that it is not just simply for refueling the body,” he said.

“One of the fundamental ideas was to come back to the idea that production is the centre of the development process.”

“Quality is a very complex, collective issue,” he said. “You cannot understand development if you do not understand that you have to base it on strong roots”.

This approach resulted in the formation of several companies with specialized niche markets producing high quality products.

His visit to the UFS coincided with that of the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Prof. Richard Ernst from Switzerland, who was also part of the fourth presentation of the Cheese fondue concept.

The main thrust of this concept is that technical advances alone are insufficient for an agreement to be reached on the minimum respect between the various groups and individuals within a society. It proposes that for this to be achieved there has to be a concurrent development of empathy and emotional synergy.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za  
27 January 2010

 

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