International Literacy Day 2021: Our investment in South Africa’s Education system

Sustainability is at the heart of our decision-making at Anglo American. One of the Global Sustainability Pillars in our Sustainable Mining Plan focuses on building thriving communities with better health, education and levels of employment.

Today, on International Literacy Day, we would like to highlight our support to the South Africa Education Programme which has been one of the greatest investments we have made in communities. Education in South Africa plays a significant role in improving people’s lives by helping to address the country’s challenges of poverty, inequality, and unemployment.

We have invested heavily in education and skills development in South Africa over several decades. In the past five years alone, we have invested more than R100 million per year, which includes interventions focused on infrastructure, administrative performance, ICT (information and communications technology), and direct teacher and learner support.

Launched in 2018, Phase 1 of the programme has made good progress to date in its fourth year of the current phase. It was created in collaboration with the Department of Basic Education of South Africa with the aim to provide wide-ranging and quality education for an estimated 73,000 learners and 2,300 teachers at 109 schools and 100 early childhood development sites (ECD) in communities around our mining operations.

One of the key components of the programme is the support and enhancement of the schools’ leadership and governance to ensure a functional and effective school environment. Training and coaching is provided to ensure each school has a sound school improvement plan that is owned and actively implemented by the governing body, management team, teachers and student leaders. The programme has an ECD (early childhood development) and WSD (whole school development) component. In the ECD component, we work with 100 ECD centres that cater to over 6000 children between the ages of 3 to 5. For the WSD component, we work with 109 schools and over 73000 students.

The programme aims to improve literacy, numeracy, mathematics, and English levels by addressing some of the underlying reasons for poor education outcomes, which include supporting school management teams, governing bodies, principals and teaching staff to operate more effectively.

Phase 1 milestones

The main highlights of the success of the programme are:

Increased number of students passing matric each year
increased quality of pass for matric students
increase in EFAL and Maths grades at Gr3, 6 and 9
improved effectiveness of school administration and SGBs and;
increased access to ICT and ICT skills

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was significant on the rollout plans for the programme. In addition to reassessing our approach, we were able to do things differently. This meant catering for online learning, Whatsapp group tutoring, helping schools manage health and Covid restrictions, support teachers to teach differently, provision of devices to both educators and teachers and being flexible to adapt the programme delivery to cater for the ever changing environment and health considerations.

This year we are partnering with the Impact Catalyst, Altron and Cisco on our ICT infrastructure with the aim of getting our communities connected to the digital economy. In addition, we are planning to provide computer devices at our schools and are partnering with other corporates, such as Amazon, Accenture and IT Master, to donate and procure devices as well. This will be coupled with zero rated content provision, support on maintenance of the equipment and devices, teacher and learner training.

We are aiming at launching a Phase 2 in 2022 that will help us expand our reach and scale of support across another 100 schools and ECD centres.

To read more on our global partnerships for school projects visit International Youth Day 2021 | Anglo American

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