Empowerment In South Africa

During an address at the Planetarium in Johannesburg in July 2003 Nelson Mandela stated that, “Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.” This well-known statement advocates that education is indeed a means through which people are able to become empowered. South Africa faces many socio-economic issues, such as inadequate healthcare, unequal distribution of wealth, poverty, human rights violations, high levels of violent crime and unrest in the working sector, yet there is one thing that almost all South Africans agree upon - that in order to address these issues and for people to be empowered, we need to be educated.

Many other nations deal with the same issues that we as South Africans face, so much so that “To

South Africa, for example, has a youth literacy rate of 95 percent, or higher (“International Literacy Day 2015”. 2015), yet we are aware that this is not an accurate reflection of the quality of education South Africans are receiving. Is South African education providing an opportunity for the process of empowerment to take

2013), we may look at education’s role in empowerment in a slightly different light. Of course, the ultimate goal is to become financially independent and maintain a standard of living where all our basic needs are met, but for some youth, their circumstances differ in comparison to most of their peers.

If we consider education as a learning process that extends, quite far, beyond the confines of mainstream schooling, it can be argued that education does indeed offer the opportunity for empowerment. At least the right type of education does. Education that caters to the specific needs of the individual, can do nothing but empower the individual, perhaps not to gain employment in the formal sector, but certainly to cope with life and in claiming their