Government has to plan for investments in infrastructure that serves poor and working-class schools into the future such that the availability of data and devices does not become reduced to the survival of the fittest. Emergency policy action now is no substitute for long-term planning to prevent what is already likely to be an exacerbation of racial and class differences in learning outcomes that compound those legacy deficits of apartheid education and post-apartheid inattention to the grinding inequalities of opportunity to learn for the children of the privileged and the children of the poor. There must be educational mitigations for the growth in inequalities between children of the privileged and the children of the poor. One way to do this is to develop a school-based version of what was developed for universities as Strategies for Addressing Unequal Technological Access. There is an urgent need for investments in teacher capability and technological capacity that leads to highly interactive, substantive and resource-rich pedagogies rather than simply ‘dumping’ content to learn for examination purposes. 

It is against this background that this Issue of Journal of South African Democratic Teachers Unionattempts to make important contributions to this worldwide debate. Articles featuring in this issue note that inequalityinduced against richand poor childacross Africa have the likelihood of deepening negative perceptionissues. Evidence showsthat in South Africa there there isunequalaccess to learning materialsbetween rich and poor child. The idea is to examine to what extent and in what ways the inequalityhas and will provoke antithetical behaviour and negative perceptionsin the African continent.