Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Categories
UFS News Media Release Research
Years
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Months
January February March April May June July August September October November December
Previous Archive
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

The challenges of local governance highlighted at the JN Boshoff Memorial lecture
2014-08-26

 

Mr Kopung Ralikontsane
Photo: Jerry Mokoroane

The annual JN Boshoff memorial lecture was hosted by the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences in conjunction with the Department of Public Management on 21 August 2014. Mr Kopung Ralikontsane, Director-general of the Free State Provincial Government, presented the keynote address, ‘Challenges Facing Local Government in Service Delivery’.

In his opening remarks, Mr Ralikontsane gave the background of the South African municipal structures, the legal framework within which they operate and the challenges they are currently facing. He added that “local government is a sphere at the coalface of service delivery and if this sphere fails, South Africa would have failed to be a developmental state.”

He said the Free State provincial government has made great strides in developing local communities, with millions of rands invested in various development projects such as water and sanitation, electrification, roads and storm water structures, community facilities and solid waste disposal.

Local government is still faced with other challenges, though. He pointed out that public employees are subject to greater scrutiny and increased demands from citizens. As a result, they have to provide better services, but within stricter limits on resources. Conflict arises due to changing relationships between public servants and citizens, downsizing, restructuring and contracting out of government services and activities.

Despite the various structures implemented by local government, municipalities are serving an ever-growing population in an economic decline. Regulations have been put into place to devise credible Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) to improve municipal infrastructure, build competent management teams and strong operations and increase technical capacity for effective delivery of services.

Mr Ralikontsane invited students to join local government in crafting innovative solutions. “We know the problem, but we need to encourage you to join forces with your local government and tackle them.”

Mr Kopung Ralikontsane has served in local government for two decades and also serves as Head of Administration of the Free State Government and as Cabinet Secretary.


We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept