South African children and many adults are habitually barefoot due to the warmer climate and cultural and religious practices. It has come to light that a staggering 59% of children wear school shoes that are either too short, too long, or too narrow for their feet, with 98% of the shoes worn by the children too narrow for their feet.
Marise Breet and Ranel Venter from the Department of Sport Science at the University of Stellenbosch have done research on the school shoes worn by our children and the findings of their study were recently published in BMC Paediatrics.
Marise Breet joined Ml Sulaiman Ravat to discuss the reasons they chose to embark on such a study.