This article seeks to explore experiences of foundation phase teachers in rural schools

Education reform, including methods to create greater gender equality, is an ongoing process in post-Apartheid South Africa. Using an African feminism theoretical framework and a critical content analysis approach, we examined the representation of female characters in a subset of supplementary reading titles created under an international development project. Through constant comparison of prepositions in the books, our findings indicated that the authors of these books (South African teachers) depicted females in complex, multifaceted, and, at times, contradictory roles. These panoramic roles created by the authors appeared to be situated in the very practical and lived experiences of children in South Africa. This study has implications for curriculum development in international settings.

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In this article, South Africa's Child Support Grant (CSG), which is a dangling carrot in curriculum development, is critiqued. This study shows that the rate of teenage pregnancy, which is fuelled by the CSG, in high schools is alarmingly high. Teachers allege that girls are lured by the CSG given to mothers to drop out of schools with the intention to babysit. The proliferation of illegitimate children born into poverty engulfs huge swathes of the country and affects the development of the school curriculum. This study was conducted in one of the districts of Limpopo province where ten schools obtained a 0% pass rate in the National Senior Certificate Examinations in 2011/12. Ninety-nine per cent of the Grade 12 learners in these schools are girls who happened to fail the gateway subjects such as Mathematics and Physical Science. The findings revealed that a decrease in education resulted in an increase in fertility and that the CSG in combination with poverty causes teenagers to drop out of school at a tender age.