Teaching coding to hungry children: getting our priorities right

Digital skills matter for our children’s future – but they cannot substitute for feeding them in a country where millions still go hungry.

Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanosteyn/p/teaching-coding-to-hungry-children?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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I write about various issues of interest to me that I want to bring to the reader’s attention. While my main work is in Artificial Intelligence and technology, I also cover areas around politics, education, and the future of our children.

Over the past few years, there has been an understandable push to bring “digital skills” and even AI literacy into South African classrooms. We talk about coding in primary school, robotics kits, tablets for every learner, and teaching children how to prompt tools like ChatGPT. As someone who works in AI, I believe these skills matter deeply for the jobs and citizenship of the future.

But there is a hard, uncomfortable truth we rarely say out loud: it is very difficult to teach a child to code when that child is hungry. Child malnutrition and hunger remain at crisis levels in South Africa, especially for children under five. If we are serious about preparing the next generation for an AI-driven world, we have to start with something much more basic: making sure they have enough to eat.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Recent data paint a grim picture. Official statistics estimate that more than 680 000 households with children under five experienced hunger in recent years, meaning they ran out of food and could not afford more. Wider food security studies suggest that roughly six in ten households are food insecure in some form. Projections indicate that, if trends continue, around 1.7 million children could be affected by hunger in the next few years.

Analyses of health surveys and the South African Early Childhood Review put hunger among under-fives at around 28–29%, affecting more than 1.5 million young children. Over roughly two decades, hunger has hovered between one-quarter and one-third of children under five – far higher than global targets and far worse than a middle-income country should tolerate. Alongside this chronic undernutrition, around a thousand children still die every year from severe acute malnutrition, often after arriving at hospitals far too late. All of this is happening in a country that, at the national level, produces enough food. The problem is not the absence of food; it is that poor households cannot afford a nutritious diet for their children.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

Now place this reality next to our digital ambitions. Government and the private sector talk about integrating coding and robotics into the curriculum, training teachers in AI tools, and rolling out digital content platforms. None of this is inherently wrong. In fact, it is essential if we want South African children to participate meaningfully in a global digital economy. But there is a danger that our rhetoric about “future-ready skills” floats above the ground, disconnected from the everyday lives of the children we claim to serve.

Hunger and early undernutrition are strongly associated with poorer school performance, lower cognitive scores and reduced earnings in adulthood. A child whose brain development has been impaired by chronic hunger is being asked to compete in the same future labour market as a well-fed child with stable internet, private tutoring and access to AI tools. That is not a fair race. For a significant share of learners, the barrier to digital inclusion is not only a lack of devices or bandwidth. It is the lack of breakfast.

Money lies at the heart of this tension. Policy work suggests that raising the Child Support Grant closer to the cost of a basic nutritious diet could dramatically reduce child poverty and hunger. Doing so would require additional spending on the scale of tens of billions of rand per year. Evaluations of the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan have shown that it was only partially funded, with large shortfalls.

At the same time, credible official and investigative estimates suggest that South Africa has lost comparable amounts each year to corruption, waste and state capture, and hundreds of billions over time. The budget is complex, and we should avoid simplistic slogans, but the moral comparison is hard to ignore: the money needed to feed children properly is in the same order of magnitude as what has already been stolen or squandered.

IMPLICATIONS

This does not mean we should abandon digital upskilling in schools until hunger is solved. It means we must re-order our priorities and connect the dots. For policymakers, that starts with treating child nutrition as foundational to any talk of “Fourth Industrial Revolution” skills. Budgets for AI labs, computer centres and digital content should sit alongside, not instead of, adequately funded grants, early-childhood nutrition programmes and school feeding schemes that provide a genuinely balanced meal.

For the education system, digital initiatives should be designed with the whole child in mind. A rural or township school that struggles to provide a daily meal and has unreliable electricity does not need a glossy AI pilot as much as it needs food, infrastructure and basic connectivity. Once those are in place, digital tools can genuinely support learning rather than becoming public-relations exercises. Private tech companies and donors also have a responsibility: if you are funding AI labs and coding clubs, ask what you are doing to support nutrition and basic conditions for learning in those same communities.

For citizens and parents, the implication is that our advocacy cannot be one-dimensional. It is possible to care passionately about AI literacy and about child nutrition at the same time. When we celebrate programmes that put robotics kits into classrooms, we should also be asking whether those same children are going to bed hungry, and what trade-offs our leaders are making in the national budget.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

South Africa urgently needs children who are comfortable with technology, able to reason about AI and equipped for a changing world of work. But we cannot code our way out of a malnutrition crisis. Teaching a hungry child to prompt an AI model while ignoring the empty plate in front of them is a moral and strategic failure. The comparison with money lost to corruption is not a clever slogan; it is a reminder that our fiscal choices are also moral choices.

If we are serious about the future of our children in an AI-driven world, we must start with the most basic form of human capital: a well-fed, healthy child whose brain and body have been given a fair chance to grow. Only then will tablets, coding clubs and AI tools become what they should be – amplifiers of potential rather than decorations over deep structural neglect.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net