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Literacy: Some of the nearly 400 delegates who attended the 2024 Makhanda Education Summit. They adopted a vision for the city to become the
\ncountry\u2019s leading educational hub by 2028. Photo: Rod Amner<\/p>\n
Between the Lines: Investigating SA\u2019s literacy crisis<\/p>\n
Over the coming weeks, this series of Mail & Guardian features will unpack South Africa\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll hear from the 350 Rhodes University students who shared their own literacy journeys, and we\u2019ll examine some of the surprising reasons learners in African-language classrooms lag so far behind and what might close that gap. We\u2019ll explore the specific interventions \u2013 ranging from classroom libraries and improved public libraries to teacher coaching programs \u2013 that the data shows are effective.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Makhanda embodies contradiction. The Auditor General of South Africa rates the performance of Makana \u2014 the local municipality which governs Makhanda and surrounding areas in the Eastern Cape \u2014 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 \u2013 more than double the national average of 19%.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study study <\/a>tested 12 000 South African Grade 4s and found that 81% couldn\u2019t retrieve basic information, interpret simple stories, or explain what they\u2019d read.\u00a0<\/p>\n Makhanda is the only South African city that tracks the reading ability of every Grade 4 student \u2013 over 1 000 yearly. While the town is in crisis, its reading scores are shattering educational norms.<\/p>\n However, this success masks a significant educational challenge. Because the very conditions that made Makhanda\u2019s progress possible may be impossible to replicate at scale without a massive shift in the way basic education is run.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n But inequality persists. While 51% of learners in no-fee English-medium schools reached reading benchmarks, only 25% of isiXhosa and Afrikaans learners did.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cChildren are reading words without grasping meaning,\u201d explains Kelly Long, GADRA\u2019s primary education program manager. \u201cWe urgently need more isiXhosa books, more imaginative teaching methods, and investment into the development of African languages as academic languages in their own right.\u201d<\/p>\n This pattern reflects a national reality: in African-language schools, only about 13% of learners can read for meaning.\u00a0<\/p>\n The making of an outlier<\/p>\n What makes Makhanda different? The answer does not lie in government interventions.<\/p>\n Makhanda\u2019s four no-fee English-medium schools participating in GADRA Education\u2019s QondaRead program reveal something remarkable: structured phonics instruction and graded readers carefully matched to learners\u2019 levels. These are Quintile 3 no-fee schools where fewer than 5% of learners speak English as their home language.<\/p>\n Yet QondaRead, developed through six years of practice-based research through Gadra\u2019s Whistle Stop School, has succeeded more than most literacy interventions.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 160 foundation classrooms lack libraries.\u00a0<\/p>\n At meetings of the Makhanda Circle of Unity education cluster, principals from the district\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What unites all these initiatives is their origin.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA university must serve the community in which it exists,\u201d he said, \u201cand education is where that service begins.\u201d<\/p>\n Mabizela assembled a task team to launch the Initiative to Revitalise Public Schooling.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to stop talking about fixing education in general and start with the one thing that unlocks everything else,\u201d recalls Kelly Long. \u201cThat one thing was reading.\u201d<\/p>\n Ten years later, substantial progress spans every level: from literacy levels, retention rates, Bachelor\u2019s passes and graduation of local students at Rhodes. Makana is now the best-performing district in the province.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Makhanda\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Sobral question<\/p>\n Civil society cannot solve South Africa\u2019s literacy crisis on its own. The scale is too vast, the resources required too substantial, and the coordination challenges too complex.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Critically, Sobral\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Western Cape education department has built a similar model of state-led reform that incorporates civil society expertise.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n They can work together precisely because the Western Cape has relatively stable education leadership, functional systems, and evidence-based practice.<\/p>\n The impossible question<\/p>\n However, the jury is out on whether the Eastern Cape offers these conditions.<\/p>\n Which raises the question: How do you scale innovation when the state is both essential and dysfunctional?<\/p>\n Since 2020, the Eastern Cape department of education has systematically underfunded the province\u2019s no-fee schools, retaining massive amounts meant for school budgets for what it calls \u201ccentralised procurement\u201d. Over the past five years, the underfunding amounts to approximately R5 billion. There is no clear breakdown of how this money is being used.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 The case is scheduled to be heard in March 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Apartheid legacies, including the merger of fragmented Bantustan systems, entrenched patronage networks, factionalism and nepotism \u2014 often involving unions like the South African Democratic Teachers Union that prioritise member interests over reform.\u00a0<\/p>\n Leadership instability, capacity gaps, political interference, and poor management lead to infrastructure delays and inequitable resource allocation.<\/p>\n The result: Schools that achieve remarkable results often do so by working around the body that is meant to support them.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In the Western Cape, state and civil society build partnerships via strong vertical accountability \u2013 from province to schools<\/a>. In the Eastern Cape, with its weak vertical structures, horizontal accountability among non-state actors fills the void in places like Makhanda.\u00a0<\/p>\n The R50 million Funda Uphumelele National Survey Project<\/a> and the Minister of Basic Education\u2019s new National Education and Training Council<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n This story was produced under the Between the Lines series with financial support from the Henry Nxumalo Foundation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Literacy: Some of the nearly 400 delegates who attended the 2024 Makhanda Education Summit. 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