Prof Shireen Motala is the South African Research Chair in Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg.
Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the South African government has relentlessly pursued equity in education, despite increasingly limited public finances. While discrimination in social spending has reduced, with race no longer a criterion, inequalities remain because of the high costs of achieving fiscal parity in education.
In higher education, slowly growing fiscal inputs are not translating into greater efficiency and quality outcomes. As such, questions persist about whether the current approach to equity is adequate, and whether differential redistribution that favours the underprivileged has taken place.
When George Boole developed Boolean algebra in 1847, nobody could have anticipated the impact it would have almost two centuries later as the foundation of the digital economy. By the 2000s, with the confluence of mathematics, chip technology and the internet, digitisation had rapidly ramped up on a commercial scale, with astounding and unimaginable results.
Our lives are now controlled by a highway of trillions of zeros and ones flashing around the globe, governing everything from the most sophisticated financial systems to appliances in ordinary households. The binary numbering system has come to dominate technology, setting the exponential growth of the digital economy. In 2020 the digital economy contributed $7-trillion to global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), growing 2.5 times faster than other contributors to GDP growth over the past three years, while the seven fastest-growing companies globally are all digitally platformed.
Julia Evans
The Soweto Canoe and Recreation Club aims to provide local youth with a chance to practise canoeing and also be supported in other ways.
Frequent paddler Brad Fisher founded it in 2003.
The club has 62 members, all from Soweto, recruited through friends and community members.
Twenty-year-old Zanentlantla Mbala joined the Soweto Canoe and Recreation Club nine years ago. At first, he found the sport strange, but today he wonders what would have become of him without it.
Mbala is one of dozens of young people recruited to the club by other canoeists.
The club was founded in 2003 by frequent paddler Brad Fisher, who noticed a lack of black athletes among Gauteng paddlers.