 Why is civic education important? Successful democracies depend on the active participation of informed citizens. Civic education aims to inform and empower citizens to fulfill this role. The purpose of civic education is to encourage and empower us to understand our political environment and to actively participate in democratic processes. This is why civic education is also known as democracy education. Civic education provides us with knowledge. For example, knowledge about our rights and responsibilities as people and on the roles and functions of government institutions and parliament. This knowledge empowers us to claim our democratic rights as well as demand good democratic governance from our elected leaders. That means that civic education shows us what we can do to protect and support our democracy. We need to learn about our rights to be able to claim them for our benefit as well as defend and use them responsibly. A lot of this information is laid out in our country's constitution. And in South Africa, we are fortunate to have a constitution, a set of laws and a political system that gives a lot of power to the people to participate. The state has to promote the Bill of Rights in order to create awareness of the rights it contains. The Department of Justice and the Human Rights Commission are some of the state institutions which have to promote this type of education. The overall objective of civic education is to promote active and responsible citizenship. Successful democracies critically depend on active citizens, people like you and me, upholding and claiming our rights. But active citizenship is not only about having rights. It is also about living up to our democratic responsibilities. For a democracy to function, it is the responsibility of people to monitor the performance of our government and hold political leaders accountable to fulfill their promises and to serve the people. If we see that things are going wrong, we can mobilize others in our community to raise awareness, change policies or ensure that proper implementation of policies and the law occurs as it should. While the state is responsible for providing basic services, it is up to the people not to violate the rights of others. Let me give you an example. An essential political right in a democracy is the right to vote. You are not obligated to vote and you are entitled not to vote. Should you decide not to vote, that does not mean that you lose any other rights. However, it means that you are reducing the total number of the voting population. If only a small proportion of voters vote in an election, this reduces the quality of its democracy. A high turnout of voters in elections is better for democracy because it means our elected leaders have more of an incentive to be responsive and accountable to ordinary people. We explained the right to vote in more detail in the video. Why should you vote? Civic education is about knowledge, knowledge of what democracy means and how it functions in line with the South African constitution. And this knowledge is power. If we are aware of the power we hold, then we can use it to our collective benefit. To use another example, if you know about your constitutional right to access to healthcare, you will not easily accept it when you are turned away from a clinic on the grounds that you cannot pay. Civic education will teach you that this is a constitutional right in South Africa and that you have the right to claim emergency medical attention for free. We explained the right to healthcare in more detail in the video. What does the right to healthcare entail? The more knowledge you gain, the more power you have to claim your constitutionally guaranteed rights to improve your life situation. And if many other people do the same, active citizens have the power to change practice or influence political decisions to the benefit of all the people of South Africa. To summarize, why is civic education so important? Civic education teaches us what we as individuals can do to protect and support our democracy. We come to understand our role and responsibility as active citizens. Especially since we have only had democracies since 1994, we need civic education to know how we can use this empowering political system to better our and all other South Africans' lives. Civic education empowers you to change the world around you for the better.