Education plan for San in pipeline

Over 80 educationalists, academics and delegates from various countries are attending a conference to formulate the first-ever education plan for the estimated 100,000 San people in the SADC region, the ‘Namibian’ reported on Tuesday. Recent studies indicate that San communities have special problems with formal education that are consistent across the region and that they are in need of specific, targeted attention from policy makers, teachers, NGOs and other stakeholders.

The week-long conference at Okahandja, 50 km north of the capital Windhoek, attracted delegates from Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. The aim of the gathering was to develop a regional plan of action that “will meaningfully address the challenges that San children face in the education systems of Southern Africa”.

David Naude, chairman of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), who is a San, said: “We aspire particularly to being taught in our mother tongues ... for at least the first few years of schooling.” Jennifer Hays, a Windhoek-based researcher at WIMSA, said one of the conference’s aims was to enable delegates “to get a broader understanding, a broader view, to see which issues exist across the borders”. According to UNESCO, 50 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, most of them indigenous, are likely to die out within the next few generations.