How a broken city doubled South Africa’s literacy rate – without the government

Between the Lines: Investigating SA’s literacy crisis

Over the coming weeks, this series of Mail & Guardian features will unpack South Africa’s literacy crisis: who is accountable for failures and how students, parents and teachers can hold duty-bearers to account, how teacher support transforms classrooms, what families can contribute when given the tools, and whether political will can overcome decades of institutional dysfunction.

We’ll hear from the 350 Rhodes University students who shared their own literacy journeys, and we’ll examine some of the surprising reasons learners in African-language classrooms lag so far behind and what might close that gap. We’ll explore the specific interventions – ranging from classroom libraries and improved public libraries to teacher coaching programs – that the data shows are effective. 

---

Makhanda embodies contradiction. The Auditor General of South Africa rates the performance of Makana — the local municipality which governs Makhanda and surrounding areas in the Eastern Cape — in the bottom 2.8% of local governments. Yet, amid poverty and dysfunction, 41% of its public school Grade 4 learners can read for meaning – more than double the national average of 19%. 

The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study study tested 12 000 South African Grade 4s and found that 81% couldn’t retrieve basic information, interpret simple stories, or explain what they’d read. 

Makhanda is the only South African city that tracks the reading ability of every Grade 4 student – over 1 000 yearly. While the town is in crisis, its reading scores are shattering educational norms.

However, this success masks a significant educational challenge. Because the very conditions that made Makhanda’s progress possible may be impossible to replicate at scale without a massive shift in the way basic education is run.

For three years, NGO GADRA Education and Rhodes University have assessed all Grade 4 learners in Makhanda. Reading for meaning rates hover twice the national mark. 

But inequality persists. While 51% of learners in no-fee English-medium schools reached reading benchmarks, only 25% of isiXhosa and Afrikaans learners did.

It’s structural, not innate. African languages are often taught through rote syllables without comprehension. Storybooks in isiXhosa are scarce, and teacher training often fails to equip educators with methods tailored to African languages.

“Children are reading words without grasping meaning,” explains Kelly Long, GADRA’s primary education program manager. “We urgently need more isiXhosa books, more imaginative teaching methods, and investment into the development of African languages as academic languages in their own right.”

This pattern reflects a national reality: in African-language schools, only about 13% of learners can read for meaning. 

The making of an outlier

What makes Makhanda different? The answer does not lie in government interventions.

Makhanda’s four no-fee English-medium schools participating in GADRA Education’s QondaRead program reveal something remarkable: structured phonics instruction and graded readers carefully matched to learners’ levels. These are Quintile 3 no-fee schools where fewer than 5% of learners speak English as their home language.

Yet QondaRead, developed through six years of practice-based research through Gadra’s Whistle Stop School, has succeeded more than most literacy interventions.

The more than 40 Foundation Phase classrooms across the city now have classroom book libraries provided through partnerships with the Lebone Centre, the Rhodes University Library, and other NGOs. These high-quality collections enable daily reading instruction. Some allow children to take books home. Still, 75% of the city’s 160 foundation classrooms lack libraries. 

At meetings of the Makhanda Circle of Unity education cluster, principals from the district’s public and private schools, NGO activists and Rhodes academics share strategies and coordinate improvements. The cluster has become a vehicle for horizontal accountability, with education leaders holding each other to standards the system fails to enforce.

The Makhanda Literacy Forum coordinates literacy interventions across early childhood to Grade 4. Rhodes offers a Certificate Course in School Leadership to local principals and deputies, as well as a Certificate in Foundation Phase Literacy Teaching to teachers. 

Hundreds of Rhodes students are involved in early childhood development programs, such as Budding Q, and tutoring each year. NGOs and activists run spelling bees, isiXhosa reading competitions and reading clubs that make literacy joyful and visible.

What unites all these initiatives is their origin.

In 2014, Makana was the fifth-worst-performing educational district in the Eastern Cape. A year later, Prof Sizwe Mabizela was inaugurated as vice-chancellor of Rhodes University and declared that the institution would not only be in Makhanda but of Makhanda. 

“A university must serve the community in which it exists,” he said, “and education is where that service begins.”

Mabizela assembled a task team to launch the Initiative to Revitalise Public Schooling. 

“We had to stop talking about fixing education in general and start with the one thing that unlocks everything else,” recalls Kelly Long. “That one thing was reading.”

Ten years later, substantial progress spans every level: from literacy levels, retention rates, Bachelor’s passes and graduation of local students at Rhodes. Makana is now the best-performing district in the province. 

Approximately 400 representatives attended the 2024 Makhanda education summit, adopting a vision that the city will become the leading education hub in South Africa by 2028. Significantly, they were joined by representatives of the Eastern Cape department of education. 

While Makhanda’s educational transformation emerged largely from outside the department, there are hopeful signs that civil society has cultivated some key allies in the local department, helping to drive transformation. 

The Sobral question

Civil society cannot solve South Africa’s literacy crisis on its own. The scale is too vast, the resources required too substantial, and the coordination challenges too complex.

Interventions that work in a small city with a university partner, active NGOs, and mobilised parents cannot simply be dropped into rural villages or sprawling townships lacking those resources. 

This is the insight that Sobral in Brazil offers. This poor northeastern city transformed from worst to best-performing through sustained, government-led reform. Starting in 1997, mayors made literacy by age eight a non-negotiable goal. They instituted merit-based hiring for principals, created rigorous assessment systems with accountability, and invested heavily in teacher training and resources.

Critically, Sobral’s transformation required political will, stable leadership, and clear, enforceable frameworks that aligned city hall with the classroom. Civil society participated, but the state was central.

The Western Cape education department has built a similar model of state-led reform that incorporates civil society expertise. 

Funda Wande, an NGO with a powerful track record, now partners with the department to roll out literacy programs at scale. Department official Almaret du Toit and Funda Wande representative Portia October recently visited Sobral to study its methods.

They can work together precisely because the Western Cape has relatively stable education leadership, functional systems, and evidence-based practice.

The impossible question

However, the jury is out on whether the Eastern Cape offers these conditions.

Which raises the question: How do you scale innovation when the state is both essential and dysfunctional?

Since 2020, the Eastern Cape department of education has systematically underfunded the province’s no-fee schools, retaining massive amounts meant for school budgets for what it calls “centralised procurement”. Over the past five years, the underfunding amounts to approximately R5 billion. There is no clear breakdown of how this money is being used. 

A Makhanda High Court case which has been ongoing since October 2023 challenges this practice. The Legal Resources Centre is representing the Makhanda Circle of Unity and several school governing bodies, arguing that the department is violating the National Norms and Standards for School Funding, and demanding the full subsidy.  The case is scheduled to be heard in March 2026. 

But the funding crisis is surface-level. Deeper down lies something more corrosive: many Makhanda principals feel unsupported, some even traumatised, by their interactions with the hierarchies of the Eastern Cape Department of Education. Unsurprisingly, the department of education has never been invited to participate in the Makhanda Circle of Unity education cluster. 

However, this raises the question: How can citizens demand effective processes of vertical accountability, similar to the horizontal ones established in Makhanda, from schools to districts, districts to province, province to national, and MPs to national?

Apartheid legacies, including the merger of fragmented Bantustan systems, entrenched patronage networks, factionalism and nepotism — often involving unions like the South African Democratic Teachers Union that prioritise member interests over reform. 

Leadership instability, capacity gaps, political interference, and poor management lead to infrastructure delays and inequitable resource allocation.

The result: Schools that achieve remarkable results often do so by working around the body that is meant to support them. 

Makhanda proves dramatic literacy gains are possible in under-resourced contexts through teacher support, materials, family programs, and collaboration. But these flourished largely independently of a provincial department marked by authoritarianism, dysfunction, and funding diversion.

In the Western Cape, state and civil society build partnerships via strong vertical accountability – from province to schools. In the Eastern Cape, with its weak vertical structures, horizontal accountability among non-state actors fills the void in places like Makhanda. 

The R50 million Funda Uphumelele National Survey Project and the Minister of Basic Education’s new National Education and Training Council signal some political will to confront the literacy crisis. However, political will means little without bridging the chasm between the state agencies that must drive change at scale and the civil society organisations that produce results on the ground.

Can South Africa scale solutions when success requires the government to invest heavily in the very civil society actors it has often failed, frustrated, or ignored? Can the state become what it must be: not an obstacle to overcome, but a partner in transformation?