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YOU know how Murphy’s Law works?
That’s obviously why my Kindle crashed the night before I was due to fly off on a three-day trip which would meld seamlessly with a two-day conference. These are the occasions for which I bought a Kindle, dammit! It’s reduced my luggage weight by at least two kilos and made travelling easier.
It took three weeks to sort out. You can’t just take a faulty Kindle back to the place you bought it from, oh no; you gotta get a new one from the USA and send the old one back, an unnecessarily complicated process which involved several long online chats with people in India, where it seems every call centre in the world is currently located.
Since the new Kindle still hasn’t acquired all the functions of the old, these online chats between this sub-continent and that are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
But it’s churlish to complain. Never mind the nine thousand-odd books propping up the walls in my home, I have nearly a hundred books on my Kindle, most of them fascinating works of non-fiction related to my interests as a journalist.
So it’s a jolt to read, in a press release from Read and Readathon, that “…over 53% of our educational institutions have fewer than 10 books, that only 23% have access to newspapers and magazines, that only 27% of our schools have libraries, and that over half of all our school-goers’ families do not have a single book in their homes”.
I started mentoring a disadvantaged child more than ten years ago. Somehow, despite her deprived home in a shack, she’d developed a thirst for reading, and I lent her books.
I learnt not to ask about them too quickly; the first time I wondered if she’d finished with one of my books, she said blithely: “Oh, yes, ages ago. Then Thobokile read it and then her best friend read it and now the lady next door to the shebeen is reading it. Do you want it back now?”
No, I said, it could wait until everyone had finished reading, my nose firmly rubbed up against the fact that decent reading material was at the sort of premium I couldn’t even grasp in her township. Books returned battered, their pages velvety-soft from having been thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed.
Improving the access our children have to books and other reading material is key to creating a generation of school-goers who are likely to grow up to be literate adults, at home with text and writing. And that has direct and measurable impact on the bottom line, apparently:
“It is estimated that if the quality of schooling in South Africa were where it should be (at a level befitting a middle income country), GDP would be R550 billion higher than it currently is, or 23% above the current level. Whilst these figures are clearly sensitive to the underlying assumptions (we tested an alternative microeconomic model, and that gives us a higher 30% value), poor quality schooling at the primary level, which increases adult illiteracy in future decades, is undoubtedly a large, and arguably the largest, inhibitor of South Africa’s growth and development.”
(The costs of illiteracy in South Africa, Martin Gustafsson et al, Stellenbosch Economic Working Papers: 14/10)
I have noticed a distinct increase in the number of solicitations I am getting for donations. I know from friends in the field that our economic woes are cutting deeper and deeper at the heart of the NGO sector – not necessarily the bigger organisations, which may get reliable help from some of the top ten donor foundations and institutions, but the smaller, niche organisations, which have traditionally relied on donations from individuals and local companies.
People running corporate social investment programmes in corporates will tell you their budgets have remained the same in real terms for five or six years, or have even been cut.
Which is woeful for our economy – there’s so much evidence that the better we fare on so many social indicators of wellbeing, the more robust an economy will be, as noted in this document from the World Bank:
“Malnutrition's economic costs are substantial: productivity losses to individuals are estimated at more than 10 percent of lifetime earnings, and gross domestic product (GDP) lost to malnutrition runs as high as 2 to 3 percent. Improving nutrition is therefore as much--or more--of an issue of economics as one of welfare, social protection, and human rights.”
So this year, as you make plans for the end-of-year corporate bash, why not scale down considerably and celebrate your survival as a business by investing in books for the school that serves the disadvantaged community closest to you? Or in starting food gardens with local community leaders? Take your staff along to put up shelves/install fencing round the veggie garden/paint/dig/whatever.
I’ve experienced this kind of year-end party, and I can tell you, it’s way more fun, and more bonding, than everyone overeating turkey stuffing and mince pies while listening to the CEO drone on about getting some rest with ‘your loved ones’ and coming back ready to really get stuck in in 2015.
The hippie mantra, “Make this world a better place”, turns out to have a grounding in economic reality.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
That’s obviously why my Kindle crashed the night before I was due to fly off on a three-day trip which would meld seamlessly with a two-day conference. These are the occasions for which I bought a Kindle, dammit! It’s reduced my luggage weight by at least two kilos and made travelling easier.
It took three weeks to sort out. You can’t just take a faulty Kindle back to the place you bought it from, oh no; you gotta get a new one from the USA and send the old one back, an unnecessarily complicated process which involved several long online chats with people in India, where it seems every call centre in the world is currently located.
Since the new Kindle still hasn’t acquired all the functions of the old, these online chats between this sub-continent and that are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
But it’s churlish to complain. Never mind the nine thousand-odd books propping up the walls in my home, I have nearly a hundred books on my Kindle, most of them fascinating works of non-fiction related to my interests as a journalist.
So it’s a jolt to read, in a press release from Read and Readathon, that “…over 53% of our educational institutions have fewer than 10 books, that only 23% have access to newspapers and magazines, that only 27% of our schools have libraries, and that over half of all our school-goers’ families do not have a single book in their homes”.
I started mentoring a disadvantaged child more than ten years ago. Somehow, despite her deprived home in a shack, she’d developed a thirst for reading, and I lent her books.
I learnt not to ask about them too quickly; the first time I wondered if she’d finished with one of my books, she said blithely: “Oh, yes, ages ago. Then Thobokile read it and then her best friend read it and now the lady next door to the shebeen is reading it. Do you want it back now?”
No, I said, it could wait until everyone had finished reading, my nose firmly rubbed up against the fact that decent reading material was at the sort of premium I couldn’t even grasp in her township. Books returned battered, their pages velvety-soft from having been thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed.
Improving the access our children have to books and other reading material is key to creating a generation of school-goers who are likely to grow up to be literate adults, at home with text and writing. And that has direct and measurable impact on the bottom line, apparently:
“It is estimated that if the quality of schooling in South Africa were where it should be (at a level befitting a middle income country), GDP would be R550 billion higher than it currently is, or 23% above the current level. Whilst these figures are clearly sensitive to the underlying assumptions (we tested an alternative microeconomic model, and that gives us a higher 30% value), poor quality schooling at the primary level, which increases adult illiteracy in future decades, is undoubtedly a large, and arguably the largest, inhibitor of South Africa’s growth and development.”
(The costs of illiteracy in South Africa, Martin Gustafsson et al, Stellenbosch Economic Working Papers: 14/10)
I have noticed a distinct increase in the number of solicitations I am getting for donations. I know from friends in the field that our economic woes are cutting deeper and deeper at the heart of the NGO sector – not necessarily the bigger organisations, which may get reliable help from some of the top ten donor foundations and institutions, but the smaller, niche organisations, which have traditionally relied on donations from individuals and local companies.
People running corporate social investment programmes in corporates will tell you their budgets have remained the same in real terms for five or six years, or have even been cut.
Which is woeful for our economy – there’s so much evidence that the better we fare on so many social indicators of wellbeing, the more robust an economy will be, as noted in this document from the World Bank:
“Malnutrition's economic costs are substantial: productivity losses to individuals are estimated at more than 10 percent of lifetime earnings, and gross domestic product (GDP) lost to malnutrition runs as high as 2 to 3 percent. Improving nutrition is therefore as much--or more--of an issue of economics as one of welfare, social protection, and human rights.”
So this year, as you make plans for the end-of-year corporate bash, why not scale down considerably and celebrate your survival as a business by investing in books for the school that serves the disadvantaged community closest to you? Or in starting food gardens with local community leaders? Take your staff along to put up shelves/install fencing round the veggie garden/paint/dig/whatever.
I’ve experienced this kind of year-end party, and I can tell you, it’s way more fun, and more bonding, than everyone overeating turkey stuffing and mince pies while listening to the CEO drone on about getting some rest with ‘your loved ones’ and coming back ready to really get stuck in in 2015.
The hippie mantra, “Make this world a better place”, turns out to have a grounding in economic reality.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
