Our final Social Justice Panel included a number of impactful organization leaders who spoke about their work in improving South Africa’s education system, bringing more effective sanitation to informal settlements and ending gender violence. Amanda was a speaker from the Equal Education Law Center. She has been involved in the Equal Education (EE) movement since her days as a student at the University of Cape Town. This movement fights for quality and equality in the South African education system. Amanda shared shocking statistics with our group: across the country, there are nearly 4,000 schools with no electricity, 2,000 with no water, 22,000 with no computer access and 11,000 with no toilets. The movement was born out of the need for infrastructure in schools but also works toward improving the general state of education.

EE’s primary strategy is to protest. We learned that in 2011, EE held a three-day sleep-in outside of Parliament to demand the implementation of minimum norms and standards in school infrastructure. The Law Center was born out of the movement’s need to protect people’s constitutional rights through litigation. Amanda shared that the Center handles many cases of discrimination, especially against African foreign nationals who are denied access to public education because they do not speak Afrikaans or cannot pay school fees (in South Africa, there are types of public schools that ask for school fees; if families cannot pay these, they can ask for government waivers). They also work with single mothers, who are harassed by school administrators when they cannot pay entire school fees. The Law Center is fighting for single mothers to be more easily exempted from paying school fees. Finally, they recently worked on a case in which a teacher hit a thirteen-year old student with a metal pipe, causing her to lose movement in her right arm. This teacher was found guilty of using corporal punishment (outlawed since 1996) and let off with a warning. She was thereafter allowed to return to the school where she worked, causing the student secondary trauma. EE is working to bring justice to this young student.

Amanda said, “Poor people are not voiceless; their voices are simply not heard. We work alongside people to give them a space in which they can take up their issues.” This statement was very impactful to me because across the cities we have traveled to, we have visited a number of communities where people are facing diverse urban struggles. Before this program, it would have been easy to say that people facing these kinds of struggles are “voiceless” but after meeting them, it is clear that they do have a voice – they are simply ignored by those in power. Additionally, in many cases, members of these communities cannot protest, either because of a very real fear of oppression (as I learned in Ahmedabad) or because of time constraints posed by responsibilities to work and family. The organizations I have met with have worked with these communities to provide them with a platform, which has helped put them on the path to accessing a more equal citizenship.