From the desk of Komala Pillay, CEO of Citizen Leader Lab 

This year, we celebrate 15 years of working in public education and supporting school leaders to become agents of change. We have worked with over 2,100 school leaders across all nine provinces, and our time on the ground in public schools has enabled us to understand the complexities and challenges that school leaders must navigate to transform their schools into centres of quality teaching and learning. 

School leaders working in low-income communities must contend with not only the typical administrative challenges of running a school but also with the socio-economic realities of the communities they serve. Issues such as poverty, crime, gangsterism and limited access to health care all negatively impact a child’s ability to learn and create additional hurdles for educators to overcome.  

Solving these challenges requires diverse expertise and support, and this is where collaboration becomes key to accelerate change. 

Collaboration is built into our DNA with our Leaders for Education programme enabling a deep and meaningful partnership between business leaders and school principals. Our School Leadership Forum has had us partnering with academic organisations and other NGOs since 2014 to bring additional tools and knowledge to our school principal alumni. We are proud of these collaborations, and we are currently building upon them with even deeper collaboration activities. 

In January I shared a new literacy collaboration project with Khanyisa Inanda Seminary Community Projects (KICP) and the FEM Education Foundation. This multi-year school literacy improvement project combines leadership development with foundation-phase teacher training and learner support. It is a school support model where we see significant potential: 

Leadership development + teacher training + learner remediation and acceleration = expedited school improvement 

We are already in conversations with other partners to apply this model to areas such as STEM improvement and youth employability. A critical principle that underpins our approach is that everything we do must be sustainable and contribute to systemic change. For this reason, our main partner and collaborator remains the Department of Basic Education. 

Collaboration is not without challenges, and so we approach each opportunity with care. It is however the only way to accelerate transformation and give South Africa a chance to achieve the ambitious 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and National Development Plan.