On weekdays, 14-year-old Luyanda Hlali gets up before dawn to fetch firewood and cow dung to start a fire and boil some water before her four siblings and parents wake up. The mornings are a hive of activity in the Nhlangothi home, in the tiny village of Stratford in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. Once her chores are done, Luyanda embarks on a 10-kilometer walk to her school. There are no school buses. There is only the long, dusty road where thieves and bad men can accost her.
'Sometimes these children go to school without eating breakfast,” said Bongiwe Nhlangothi, Luyanda's grandmother. She says she fears the most when her grandchildren are on the road. “There are drug addicts around here, when they come across the children in the early hours of the morning, they rob them of their phones, threaten them with knives and try to rape them,' Nhlangothi said.