Joint Civil Society Statement
27 February 2025
As civil society organisations committed to food justice, children’s health and education rights,
we are alarmed by the recent handover of McDonald’s-branded ‘Mi Desk’ desks to two Cape
Town schools, facilitated by the Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube. This follows
similar corporate-branded desk donations from Old Mutual and Hollywood Bets. We are
concerned about this disturbing trend, which must end now.
The McDonald’s donation of desks to schools should not be seen as charity. It is junk food
marketing targeting vulnerable children. At a time when South Africa faces a compounding crisis
of malnutrition, obesity, and a non-communicable disease epidemic, allowing fast food branding
into schools is grossly irresponsible and negligent. The Department of Basic Education (DBE)
should be safeguarding children’s health, not exposing them to the marketing of high-fat, sugar,
and salt (HFSS) foods under the guise of corporate donations. Additionally, McDonald’s is using
the bodies of children as unpaid walking billboards for the junk food market. By slapping its logo
on the MiDesk, it ensures that its brand is paraded through communities at no cost while
profiting from the very eating habits that harm children’s health.
“Minister Gwarube’s decisions cannot be a compromise between private interests and protecting
our children from harmful advertising. Her responsibility is to serve the public and the
constitution, which means keeping private interests in check and ensuring big businesses don’t
profit at the expense of our children,” says Palesa Ramolefo of Amandla.mobi.
Over the past 20 years, we have seen South African markets flooded by fast and
ultra-processed foods. Foods high in sugar, salt and fat and low in nutrients are helping to fuel
the obesity epidemic – with nearly one in every four children under five now either overweight or
obese. Sophisticated marketing campaigns tap into children’s deepest desires and longing for
love, family, friendship and belonging, while relatively low prices make fast foods even more
desirable amidst widespread poverty and deepening inequality. These branded desks are a form
of advertising for McDonald’s. They instrumentalise children as consumers of unhealthy food
and contribute to normalising the routine consumption of fast food.
“The DBE should be intensifying its efforts to enhance the school nutrition programme, not
helping to further socialise young children into the consumption of health-devastating foods.
These foods jeopardise the physical, mental and emotional performance of children, and
thereby their futures,” says Zukiswa Zimela of Healthy Living Alliance (HEALA).
In its updated guidelines on policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food
marketing released in 2023, the World Health Organization notes that children’s rights, including
their right to health, their access to safe and nutritious food, and their right to be free from
exploitation, are undermined by the marketing of HFSS foods – the category into which
Mcdonald’s food falls. As such, countries that are party to the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child, like South Africa, have a legal duty to ensure that these rights are protected
and fulfilled, and that business respects them.
It cannot be said that our government is adequately performing this duty if the DBE actively
supports the direct marketing of McDonald’s food to children. This incident demonstrates that
the South African government urgently needs to finalise regulations and develop legislation to
restrict the marketing of unhealthy food in general and to children in particular, as was done by
other countries globally,including Canada (Quebec), Norway, Iran, the United Kingdom, Chile,
Mexico, Ireland, Argentina, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Spain, and Sweden.
Why are corporations donating school furniture? McDonald’s branded desk donation illustrates
the dangers of austerity and the consequent cuts to the education budget – it incentivises
corporate actors to encroach into spaces abandoned by the state. It is no coincidence that the
‘beneficiaries’ of these desks are black children in rural and working-class communities. Gaps
opened up by deliberate disinvestment are then given a band-aid by corporate ‘philanthropy’.
But this is not generosity – it is branding, which also further promotes unhealthy behaviours in
children, like gambling in the case of Hollywood Bets-branded desks. Such corporate actors are
turning classrooms into advertising spaces, and the children who carry the desks when folded
into bulky bags into walking advertisements while distracting from the structural failures of the
government to fulfil its constitutional duties.
This is the flip side of austerity in public education. Corporate charity is not a substitute for
government responsibility. The only sustainable solution is for the National Treasury to properly
fund education and ensure that every child has access to dignified learning conditions without
strings attached.
We call for immediate action:
● The Minister and Department of Basic Education must immediately withdraw support for
the branded MiDesk donation, recall the branded desks and ensure that the provincial
education department supplies desks to the school as per its mandate and desist from
any such partnerships with Big Food and the gambling industry in the future;
● The Minister must issue a public explanation of the contents and mechanics of these
branded partnerships in terms of the concerns we have raised and actively engaged with
us as concerned civil society organisations on this matter;
● The South African government should urgently finalise the draft regulations R3337 on
the Labelling and Advertising of Foodstuffs, and the Audio and Audio Visual Content
Services White Paper both of which include provisions to protect children from the
marketing of foods that are harmful to health. In addition, Regulation R3337 needs to be
strengthened to prohibit the marketing of fast and ultra-processed foods in child-centred
settings such as schools and early learning programmes;
● The government must strengthen regulations around corporate social investments to
ensure that they are ethical, transparent, and not transactional. Ethical corporate support
should strengthen and be subordinate to, not substitute, the state’s obligations to
learners.
DBE should desist from selling children a sick future. Schools should be safe spaces that
protect children from the marketing of products that are harmful to their health, not open
markets for corporate exploitation and expansion.
[ENDS]
For media enquiries, please contact:
● Zukiswa Zimela | HEALA | zukiswa@heala.org | 0745210652
● Ayanda Sishi-Wigzell | Equal Education | ayanda@equaleducation.org.za | 0768793017
● Dalli Weyers | IEJ | dalli.weyers@iej.org.za | 0824602093
Issued by the 21 organisations listed below:
- Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ)
- HEALA
- Amandla.mobi
- Biowatch
- Black Sash
- Budget Justice Coalition
- Children’s Institute
- Eastern Cape Health Crisis Action Coalition
- Equal Education Law Centre
- Equal Education
- GrowGreat
- Justice and Activism Hub (JAH)
- Priceless SA
- RuNurSA (Rural Nursing South Africa)
- Rural Doctors Association of South Africa (RuDASA)
- SA Council of Churches
- SAFCEI (Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute)
- SECTION27
- Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI)
- Southern African Food Lab
- Union Against Hunger
