The other side of the moon

Dr. David Harrison, current CEO of the DG Murray Trust and past CEO of loveLife, recently presented a public lecture entitled, 'The other side of the moon: Do we look there enough to find answers to South Africa’s most difficult challenges?' The lecture was organised by the School of Journalism and Media Studies and The Discovery Centre for Health Journalism.

Harrison argued that the 'Big Five' challenges facing South Africa are HIV and AIDS, ineffective education, unemployment, corruption and environmental degradation. He admitted this was not a particularly original list, but argued that the time-worn solutions and incremental approaches used to tackle these challenges were not achieving much success. He suggested some 'other side of the moon' solutions, focusing his talk particularly on HIV and education.

According to Harrison, part of the problem is an over-reliance on a government that is often not best-placed to find and implement solutions. "We acknowledge that social fragility and fragmentation are behind many of our persistent social ills but don't really know what to do about them, other than to call for moral regeneration and collective responsibility," said Harrison. "We turn to government to deal with these problems, yet many will only be resolved through the softer touch of civil society."

Discussing the inability to bring down the level of approximately 300,000 yearly HIV infections in South Africa, Harrison argued that "people consistently, under conditions of risk, make subliminal choices that they perceive to be the least risky." "People don't look at risks in isolation, but in relation to the other risks they are experiencing in their lives. But when we ask people in national surveys about their perceived risk of HIV, we never put it in the context of other risks. We ask them whether they think they are at risk of contracting HIV – period. We think of HIV as an absolute risk, rather than a risk relative to time and place."

Harrison believes that the only way to tackle the decisions that young people were making in terms of risky sexual behaviour, was to foster what he called a sense of "real and imminent possibility in life", partly by developing "leadership-with-opportunity programmes for young people who have proven their commitment to public good." This would go some way in creating positive opportunities and role-models in our communities. "People often change their whole behaviour if there is someone they want to be like and believe they can be like that person."

Harrison also spoke of a novel solution to the incredibly high drop-out rates in schools, suggesting the need for an 'external shock' to the educational system, via conditional cash transfers to children from poor families. "Why don’t we pay young people and their families for them to stay in school?" Citing the Mexican Oportunidades programme, which currently covers 5.8 million families, or about 30% of the population and recent Brazilian experiments with direct cash payments to poor families, Harrison noted this would be a far cheaper way and would achieve more success than almost any other intervention in education.

Harrison concluded by stressing the need for creating new ways of forging social solidarity. "We urgently need a new social contract between government and civil society – a set of prospecting and mining rights for the other side of the moon. At their core, the recent wide-spread social protests are not about toilets, tarred roads or brick houses – they're about a sense of isolation, a lack of real and imminent possibility in life. It's the national psyche and the country’s social fabric, both of which are so damaged, that they now warrant as much attention as we have given to the physical infrastructure such as hospitals, roads and stadiums."