Joburg's commitment to its children: Spotlight on initiatives during Children’s Month

November is Children’s Month in South Africa - a time to reflect on how our cities nurture, protect and inspire their youngest citizens. If you want to know the soul of a city, ask how it treats its children. Do they walk safely to school? Can they play beneath trees, splash in clean rivers and see adults who care enough to repair what’s broken? A city that works for children, works for everyone.

A few weeks ago, a group of women working on the SUNCASA project with our partner, Alexandra Water Warriors, made a heartbreaking discovery. A baby discarded in a plastic bag on the banks of the Jukskei River. She was alive.

At the Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP), we’ve learned that regeneration isn’t only about buildings and investments. It’s about people - about how we care for one another and for the places that hold our lives together. The women who found the child reminded us of that truth.

Below are a few quiet revolutions unfolding, or preparing to unfold, on our streets each day.

Care

A caring city teaches its children that they belong. Our soon-to-be-launched Joburg Fix Squad will take this principle to heart - employing local residents to fix pavements, patch potholes, repaint kerbs and restore dignity to the public realm. Alongside them, the Social Employment Fund partner teams continue their vital work of cleaning streets, recycling waste and finding new value through upcycling - showing that every material, like every person, can have another life in the pocket plazas and public spaces that bring our city together.

Care also extends beyond pavements and parks. Our partners maintain food gardens that support feeding schemes for children, while also supplying fresh produce to local communities. Others are at work in inner-city homes, helping address gender-based violence and creating safer domestic spaces where children can grow and feel secure. It’s a simple but radical idea - the people who live in the city should be the ones who help care for it, while teaching the next generation what it means to look after our shared resources - responsibly and with care.

Safety

Safety begins with presence, not fences. Our Safety Ambassadors walk the streets with open eyes and a readiness to help. They guide, greet, report hazards and remind us that safety grows where people know one another’s names. We have partnered with JoziMyJozi for solar streetlights along a section of the Walkable Network. These lights have made the streets safer after dark, so that children can walk home without fear.

Play and Participation

A playful city invites imagination and discovery. Our Pocket Plaza project is just beginning - a network of public spaces reimagined for play, interaction, getting closer to nature and the shared expression of art. We are working with renowned artist Hannelie Coetzee to lead its creative development, bringing together art, placemaking, nature-based solutions and community participation.

Across the Inner City, parks are coming alive again - places where children and adults meet through basketball, street racket, boxing, netball, chess and soccer. Our Social Employment Fund partners host story times, early childhood programmes, community learning sessions and cultural performances that turn open spaces into classrooms, playgrounds and gathering points. 

Alongside this, the steady work of care continues - cleaning, patrolling and maintaining the parks so that they remain safe, welcoming and open to all.

Nature

A living city breathes with its children. Our SUNCASA and Social Employment Fund partnerships bring nature-based solutions to life - planting trees, cleaning rivers and weaving green corridors through the hard edges of the inner city. As we clean the Jukskei and restore its banks, we think of the river child - a reminder of why this work matters and what it means to bring life back to wounded places.

This work extends to leadership and learning. Through outdoor activities and environmental education, young people are reconnecting with nature - learning teamwork and environmental stewardship. In our food gardens and river clean-ups, they learn that caring for nature and caring for people go hand in hand.

Learning and Growth

Previously unemployed participants in our programmes gain new skills - horticulture, safety, recycling, emotional intelligence and financial management - while children in nearby parks read, paint and learn. Together, they remind us that learning happens everywhere.

Through street libraries, after-school support and educational outings, our Social Employment Fund partners help make the city a place of learning and opportunity. 

Belonging and Connection

Children thrive where people gather and share stories. Our Walkable Network is aimed at linking neighbourhoods through walkable routes and public spaces that bring people together. Connection is infrastructure - as essential as bricks or fibre.

Together with local teams, we help strengthen early childhood development centres - creating safe, nurturing spaces where young children can play, learn and begin to feel that they belong to the city.

Hope and Future

Hope is built one small act at a time. The baby found beside the river survived. The women who discovered her named her Mbalienhle - “beautiful flower.” May she grow in a city where she belongs and feels safe.

Joburg is tough and restless, yet still becoming. And perhaps we’ll know it’s healing - in the wet dust on clean pavement after rain, street shared at a bustling street corner, children playing safely beneath bright new murals, chess games unfolding under the shade of trees and the sound of laughter and music drifting through open windows.

And perhaps that’s the question for all of us - for planners, parents, neighbours and leaders alike. The Bernard van Leer Foundation’s Urban95 initiative asks us to imagine our cities from 95 centimetres high - the eye level of a three-year-old child. What will Johannesburg look like from that height? 

What will we change?

For Mbalienhle - the river child.