It never used to be this way. Failure was bad and comfort was good. We saw it at home. We learnt it in school. We also learnt to compete. We made our beds and lay in them comfortably, planning traditional competitive plans that simply had to succeed. They had to. Otherwise why bother? What would […]
4. Teacher training, knowledge and confidence Every person we interviewed noted that many South African teachers feel overwhelmed by the crisis in education and by a sense of hopelessness. Sam Christie, director of South African Innovative Learning Intervention (SAILI), an organisation that links academically talented students with well-functioning, low-fee state schools, claimed that the […]
Despite significant government spend, the education system in South Africa is failing our learners. Results are significantly weaker than those of learners in our poorer sub-Saharan neighbour, Zimbabwe, which seems baffling on the surface. But let’s try to make some sense of it. Let’s examine the trending areas of challenge and the potential changes that […]
South Africa spends 5.4% of its GDP – or 16.9% of total government spending in 2009 – on education. This is more than most emerging- market countries can afford, yet still, we remain far behind a number of these countries in terms of educational performance. Unicef estimates that in Zimbabwe, 10 children have to […]
Social innovation prizes spur social innovation, right? Well, sometimes they do, and their winners keep winning. Other times they don’t, and we all wonder, “What was the point of that?” Let’s assess the good, the bad and the ugly… the winners, the losers and the choosers. In 2009, I entered the We Media PitchIt! Challenge – a competition […]
In August 2013, Kevin Starr blogged controversially in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) that innovation prizes should be “dumped”, or at least massively reworked. Some of his criticisms: Competitions drain an already resource- deprived sector. They waste masses of time, generating many losers and thousands of lost hours for social change agents. There is […]
Altino Louw’s business turns plastic bags into handbags. It also employs uneducated people from the community in which he grew up. He’s a student of an academy that’s solving social problems by creating entrepreneurs who solve problems. Clearly. It’s the perfect example of addressing social issues from the inside out. First, identify entrepreneurial individuals from challenging communities. Then give them the […]
He was born and grew up in Belhar, Cape Town, in a community characterised by gangsterism and drugs. He’s faced various personal, social and financial challenges, but always had a positive attitude and innovative spark. Altino Louw stoked that spark in the 2013 RAA class and in a business that manufactures quality products from household […]
You can’t find a good match if you don’t know where to look. And that’s what the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) is.A place to look. A meeting, greeting, profiling and potential partnership point. “It’s like internet dating for education organisations,” says IkamvaYouth founder, Joy Olivier. Here’s how CEI might help Olivier and others find […]
Programme description LEAP is a chain of no-fee, independent high schools that provide academic and life skills to the kind of skills they require to become future leaders. The schools require only a nominal fee from students, and are otherwise funded primarily by private donors. Mathematics, Physical Science and English are mandatory subjects. School days […]
Programme description South African Innovative Learning Intervention (SAILI) identifies highperforming, low-income students and high-performing, low-cost schools with strong Maths and Science programmes. It then uses scholarships to support these academically talented students in attending these low-cost, high-quality schools. The aim is to produce graduates who continue into Maths and Science fields. Since the programme began in 1996, over 500 graduates have […]
Programme description IkamvaYouth is a support, tutoring and mentorship initiative that works to equip learners from townships and other disadvantaged communities with the knowledge, skills, networks and resources to access tertiary education or employment. The aim is to address common obstacles to academic achievement. How? By providing supplementary support to secondary school students after school, on Saturday mornings and […]
Not only does the schooling environment directly affect the adults its students become, it also affects the organisations and social systems that those adults create. It’s time we thought about that. Critics of modern schooling like John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich have recognised that the fundamental curriculum that schools teach is school itself. I’ve […]
How using dreams in the educational space can lead to a life of individual and social consequence. In the public discourse, people like to talk about the structural issues contributing to the crisis in education in South Africa. They talk about the lack of textbooks, the shortage of qualified teachers, the poor quality of education […]
My journey from Nuclear Physics to producing free school textbooks with people all over the world. It happened during my Masters at the University of Cape Town. I suddenly began to pay more attention to the school education sector and its needs. Initially, I just enjoyed being a tutor in the Physics Department. This ultimately […]
One of the great challenges of development work is that you can never really tell whether or not it’s making a difference in the lives of its beneficiaries. Except… you can. Here’s how to find the data you need to quantify the return on social investment – and why you need to do it now. […]
As with any business, measuring – and demonstrating – the success of a social investment will help the organisation driving that investment to grow. But if your organisation offers social programmes, you need to have proper systems in place before you can even think of expanding your services. In fact, scaling a social investment can be a waste of time (and money) […]
The SROI Network suggests using this list of seven simple checkpoints when measuring return on social investment offered by an innovation or organisation: 1. Involve the stakeholders Identify and consult stakeholders as the analysis is undertaken. This is to ensure that the value (and the way it’s measured) is informed by the actual people who are supposed to benefit from what you’re […]
In their report, Measuring Social Impact: The Foundation of Social Return on Investment (SROI), the London School of Business takes things a step further by identifying a flow of four main elements required to measure what they call “social value creation”. This is how it works: 1. INPUTS The resources needed and invested in your […]
It’s still early days for Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) in Africa. These financial innovations, which first piloted in the UK in 2010, use private investor capital to fund existing social interventions. The government commits to repaying the money with interest if the intervention is a measurable success. In short, a SIB is a financial and social investment that should have […]
