By Farrell Hunter
During February 2024, the DVV International South Africa office hosted a national adult education conference in partnership with national Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). The conference brought together community college management, national and provincial officials of the DHET as well as Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and university partners of DVV International.
For the past few years, DVV International has been supporting the NFE capacity development of Community Learning Centre (CLC) adult educators, community colleges and CLC management in four of the provinces as well as CET branch officials at the national level. The conference was held to reflect on the current status of development of Non-Formal Education (NFE) within the Community Education and Training (CET) system and to consider the potential for wider NFE roll out across all nine provinces.
Speaking after the conference, the country Director for the DVV International South Africa office, Farrell Hunter, said, to date, formal adult education is being provided as the primary offering of second chance education via CLCs with youth being the predominant participants at centres.
Hunter said: “This, for the reason that the formal education system and prevailing socio-economic conditions see a high percentage of youth exiting high school before completing their final year. To address what has been referred to as a poly-crisis affecting youth and adults in the most marginalised communities, a more relevant NFE education approach is being promoted to assist especially marginalised communities in dealing with a number of the socio-economic challenges that plaque them.”
The vast experience of DVV International and its partners in popular education, using a particular non-formal education approach with a transformation focus is the reason that we are in partnership with the DHET, to support the advancement of community education in CLCs. The partnership is constituted via a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was agreed to by DVV International and the DHET.
During the conference, Community College principals shared their perspectives and efforts towards NFE via skills development programmes. These programmes primarily address income generation as an effort to response to the extremely high levels of unemployment and poverty. A few of the programmes undertaken by CLCs include issues such as gender inequality while most of the non-formal programmes relate to non-credit bearing skills development. Often, non-formal skills development is deemed by many within the system to be non-formal education. In this regard, a number of conference participants pointed to the policy objectives that include the need for community education that moves beyond individual hard skills offerings and towards broader understanding of community education for transformation. This will ideally, as example, see collectives in communities being capacitated to critically unpack and engage with a wider range of approaches for socially relevant community education.
The DHET provided a detailed presentation on the content of the Ministerial Task Team report that was being finalised for submission to the Director General for Education and the national Higher Education Minister. The MTT presentation was shared to allow for participants at the conference to opportunity engage on some of the content and share opinions on the recommendations they might want to make. Whilst there was broad appreciation of the work of the MTTs work, among the concerns expressed was that there still remains a strong weighting in approach of the skills and short on the broader contextual considerations of the challenges beyond the skills paradigm. When the conference addressed the item in the report on partnerships, a member of the MTT who was at the conference noted that the Task Team acknowledged DVV International’s role in supporting NFE in the CET sector and particularly with CLCs.
The DVV International Regional Director for Southern Africa, Gerhard Quincke provided the conference with some insights into DVV International’s work in the Southern African region and brought a wider range of international perspectives to the discussion. Quincke’s presentation included information on the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) that sparked keen interest among conference delegates.
Among other, the purpose of the CESA is to “… reorient Africa’s education and training systems to meet the knowledge, competencies, skills, innovation and creativity required to nurture African core values and promote sustainable development at the national, sub-regional and continental levels”. With this purpose the Strategy contains twelve strategic objectives to guide its implementation.
With the highest income inequality in the world, many socio-economic analysts lament that South Africa will continue to find it difficult to address the plethora of challenges that seem to limit the development indictors it aims to address. Still, there are committed community education educators and social movement activists who see the value to engage in popular education approaches for social transformation. The working group that was proposed at the conference will likely look at these approaches to find ways to support community colleges and CLCs in their efforts at the local level.