On World Children’s Day, and every day, we have to stop treating children’s rights as an annual social-media moment and start treating them as the urgent, ongoing crisis they actually are. We’ve spent more than a decade sitting across from children who have been raped, starved, orphaned, beaten, and forgotten. We’ve held the hands of nine-year-olds who flinch when an adult voice is raised, twelve-year-olds who cook for baby siblings on paraffin stoves because both parents are gone, six-year-olds who fall asleep clutching empty stomachs while politicians argue about tenders in air-conditioned chambers.

The statistics are brutal. The stories behind them break you. South Africa’s children are not “the future leaders of tomorrow.” That phrase has become a cruel postponement of responsibility. They are the present. And right now, far too many of them are surviving instead of living. We already know exactly what works. The evidence is decades old, tested, costed, and sitting on shelves gathering dust. The only thing missing is the collective will to act, not in bursts of outrage when a particularly horrific case hits the headlines, but every single day.

Dr. Shaheda Omar from the Teddy Bear Foundation has come up with a powerful 7 point response to International Children’s Day, entailed here below:

1. Strengthen families before they break

Parenting programmes that actually reach rural areas. Mental health support for caregivers drowning in trauma and poverty. Economic relief that lands in the right bank accounts the same month it is budgeted for.

2. Make every community a safe zone for children

Safe parks with working lights. Free after-school programmes that keep children off the streets until their parents get home. Neighbourhood watches that walk the talk. Community policing forums that are funded and functional, not just a line item on a mayor’s speech.

3. Fix the child-protection system that is supposed to be the last safety net

Hire the 20 000 missing social workers. Pay them salaries that reflect the nightmares they carry home. Clear the court backlogs that keep abused children trapped in dangerous homes. Shift at least half the removal budget into prevention, because every child kept safely at home is cheaper and infinitely better than every child placed in a crumbling children’s home.

4. Give every child the education

Our country desperately needs them to have Universal, quality Early Childhood Development. Schools with flush toilets, not pit latrines that kill. An immediate end to corporal punishment. Classrooms with roofs and teachers who are paid on time. No more children learning under trees while we find billions for stadiums nobody asked for.

5. Attack poverty like the child-rights violation it actually is

Jobs that pay enough for a parent to buy food and school shoes. Nutrition programmes that feed children seven days a week, not five. Decent housing so that a six-year-old is not raped walking to a communal tap in the dark.

6. Stop speaking about children and start listening to them

School councils with real decision-making power. Children sitting on municipal IDP committees. Child delegates addressing Parliament once a year and being taken seriously the other 364 days.

7. Build a culture that values children 365 days a year

Reject the belt, the open hand, the verbal shredding of a child’s soul. Celebrate their art, their sport, their ideas. Accept deeply, uncomfortably, expensively  that every child in this country is all of our responsibility, whether they were born in Sandton or Khayelitsha. Today the blue balloons are out. The branded T-shirts are being worn. The speeches are being delivered. Tomorrow those balloons will be on the floor, the T-shirts will be in the wash, and the microphones will be packed away. And some child, somewhere, will still be raped on her way to school.

Unless we decide right now that tomorrow must be World Children’s Day too. And the day after that. And every day until no child in South Africa has to carry wounds no child should ever have to carry.  Our children are watching how we treat the most vulnerable among them. Let’s make sure the South Africa they inherit is one that finally chose courage over complacency, action over apathy, and love over indifference.  Not just today, but every single day from now on? #WorldChildrensDay #LeaveNoChildBehind #ItTakesAVillage #ChildProtection #SouthAfrica