Through partnerships and hard labour, a small community has improved its children’s education, writes Kerry Swift
The air of resignation that hung over Chief Zenzile Daluxolo’s lands in the Transkei region during the reign of the Matanzimas has given way to eager expectation. Political emancipation has come for the chief and his wards, but with it comes a tidal wave of hope that the seismic events of the 1990s will usher in a better life for his people.
One of the first signs of hope for the people living in this impoverished area of the Eastern Cape came in 1994 when Mombulelo Tuyafu-Maki was made headmistress of the local school. The new head marshalled her teachers and persuaded the local community that, though they were poorly resourced, they were rich in dreams.
Daluxolo School’s sole classroom certainly wasn’t much to look at. It was built from mud bricks made at the school site. Nor did it have much in the way of facilities there were no desks, no chairs, no electricity, no toilets, no chalk or blackboard and, in most cases, no books. But Tuyafu-Maki and her staff persevered. They had endured the past stoically enough; what price a bit more patience now that their eyes were fixed on the future?
But somehow the future took its time in coming. Each December, when the summer rains swept across Daluxolo’s lands, the home-made bricks supporting the schoolhouse would revert to mud and the school would collapse. Then, when the rains stopped, the community rebuilt their single classroom.
Evidence of this annual build-fest remains in the 60m2 depression near the school building where, for the past eight years, the red soil was dug out to make bricks to shore up the school. Few people have work in these remote parts and the school became something of a symbol, a sacred trust as it were, to ensure that the next generation will at least have a shot at a better life.
But finally the future did arrive. Schiller wrote that all history is coincidence and it certainly was pure accident that Daluxolo School came to the attention of Professor Shepherd Mayatula, chairperson of the standing parliamentary committee on education.
One of the first things Mayatula did when he was appointed to head this committee was to forsake the talk-shop culture that has gripped the government and head out into the country to assess educational needs first hand, particularly in the rural areas where the need is greatest.
From his odyssey came a priority list for rural school development. Mayatula says: “In the Eastern Cape alone there is a shortfall of 20 000 classrooms. Each year we fall further behind because schools simply collapse during the rainy season and we can’t build permanent structures fast enough.”
His involvement with Daluxolo was providential. “I was travelling around the area looking at schools when I passed this way quite by chance and met with members of the community. I was so touched by what these people were doing for their children, that providing a permanent school here at Daluxolo became a pet project for me.”
At about the same time, Reggie Naidoo, a former East London union activist with roots in the small business development arena, joined the financial services group, Decillion Limited, with a mandate to transform the group and develop a social investment arm.
“The group had no social investment arm at the time and this, together with transformation, became a priority issue,” says Naidoo. Today 0,5% of Decillion’s after-tax profit R1-million in the current financial year is channelled into social investment through the Decillion Foundation. The Daluxolo School project, which has seen the erection of three fully equipped and permanent classrooms, is just the first of many similar schools that the foundation wants to see built across rural South Africa in the next few years.
“We believe Daluxolo is the model for the future,” Naidoo says. “Basically it is a ‘sweat equity’ model where the donor community provides materials and local communities build and maintain their own schools. Members of the Daluxolo community even slept in the schoolyard during the building phase to safeguard the building materials that were delivered there.
“But it is equally a partnership with government, which has to provide support through local political and educational structures, which monitor the building projects.
“When local communities provide labour at no cost to the donor or the state, and when they take on responsibility for maintenance and security of school buildings and their contents, they effectively take ownership. We believe this is the best and most cost-effective way of providing for the country’s classroom needs. We have shown that it works and we are getting our own clients to buy into the programme.
“We are also challenging other companies to get on board because the needs are great and if we don’t help to educate the people, there will be no future economy to speak of anyway.”
Cal Masterten-Smith, executive director of the foundation, says the model that Decillion has pioneered means permanent rural schools can be built for as little as R75 000 each. “We already have three more schools in the pipeline two of which will be funded by foreign donors and we are calling on companies looking for worthwhile social-investment projects to contact us so we can help facilitate more projects of this nature.”
When the rains came to Idutywa in December, Daluxolo School did not fall down. The partnership between the Decillion Foundation, the government and the community gave the children of the area the best possible Christmas gift the prospect of an uninterrupted education and a passport to a much wider world.