Effective March 2026, Belinda Wood has taken over as our new CEO. Belinda brings extensive experience in strategy and execution, and we are confident she will build on the strong relationships and high-impact work SEA is known for.

Our co-founder, Jenny Cargill, will transition to the role of Founder & Senior Adviser, continuing to support SEA’s growth, key client relationships, and thought leadership, including our ongoing work clients. This ensures continuity and seamless support for our clients and partners during this transition.

We are grateful for Jenny’s leadership in shaping SEA and are excited for the next chapter under Belinda’s guidance.

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As the new administration finds its footing, the increasing concentration of authority within the presidency has sparked considerable debate.

Critics argue that this shift reflects the emergence of a “super-presidency,” fueling calls from the opposition for a dedicated parliamentary oversight committee. However, supporters praise the presidency’s focus on delivery and tangible outcomes, as exemplified by the Operation Vulindlela unit.

Adding to the complexity is an unusual partnership with the private sector, which has drawn both praise and criticism. This trend is not unique to SA; it mirrors a broader international phenomenon. 

Across the globe centres of government, such as a president’s office, are assuming oversight of functions traditionally managed by government departments. This shift is not without controversy, but is gaining traction due to several factors. 

We are living in unprecedented times, marked by urgent demands for change. The transition from an industrial to a technological era is occurring against the backdrop of a looming existential crisis for the planet and escalating geopolitical tensions. New models of organisation and production are essential, and governments worldwide are struggling to keep pace.

It is challenging to articulate coherent policies suited to a rapidly changing, uncertain future. Equally difficult is developing the organisational agility necessary to deliver effective results in this environment.

The pressure on governments to be more results orientated is not new. Various responses have emerged, but none has been as appealing as the delivery approach initiated by Tony Blair in the UK. As British prime minister Blair established a dedicated unit to oversee and intervene in the implementation of a select set of priorities, setting a precedent that continues to influence governance models today.

This is what is unfolding in the presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa. There are several critical priorities that have been centralised under the presidency’s project management office, which oversees Operation Vulindlela, the national energy crisis committee, the national logistics crisis committee, the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan and employment programmes, among others.

This delivery approach has proven effective in various contexts. In developed, well-resourced governments it enhances performance, especially in areas requiring complex, cross-cutting co-ordination, while also integrating “data for action” systems that enable timely problem-solving and decision-making. In contrast, less resourced or failing states often emphasise accomplishing tasks that should be routine.

SA finds itself somewhere between these extremes. The state’s deteriorating delivery systems have entrenched poor work habits, inadequate capabilities and ineffective cultures. As a result even basic tasks require enormous effort. On the other hand, there are pockets of effective delivery that are being leveraged to improve outcomes.

There are several critical priorities that have been centralised under the presidency’s project management office.

SA is also distinguishing itself through innovative partnerships, notably with business, aimed at addressing delivery failures. While this is a global trend, SA serves as a unique test case, particularly for low- to middle-income countries that grapple with governance and economic challenges but possess external expertise that can be harnessed to support state delivery, over and above the conventional contractual arrangements, such as public-private partnerships. 

The business partnership focuses on the three areas of crisis — in energy, logistics and crime — and offers a range of support. Some aspects are straightforward, such as funding and deploying expertise, while others are more complex, particularly when policy, strategy and planning enter the mix.

The national energy cisis committee was tasked with ending load-shedding, a challenge requiring the implementation of reform measures in the absence of a cohesive reform policy. Those involved likened this task to “repairing and redesigning a plane in mid-flight,” highlighting the need to blend day-to-day problem-solving with the introduction of longer term reforms.

There is much that cannot be anticipated. For example, lifting the regulatory limit on private generation in renewables had the unintended consequence of constraining grid access and with that the public procurement programme, which functions according to different rules and at a different pace.   

This scenario is not unique to SA; many governments face similar challenges where the ideal sequence of policy development followed by implementation is increasingly unattainable. The intertwining of these processes raises the risk of allowing specific interests to exert disproportionate influence over policy formulation, and therefore requires careful management. 

This brings us to the issue of parliamentary oversight of the presidency. There is a strong case for ensuring that the presidency’s interventions achieve their intended outcomes. Effective oversight requires robust assessment measures. However, as my colleague in Argentina, Martin Alessandra, notes in his co-authored book The Centre of Government Revisited, there are “methodological challenges to accurately measuring the true impact … of the organisation and practices of the centres of government.” He emphasises the need for a careful approach to such measurement. 

What is not needed is the conventional public sector performance measurement, where real outcomes are often avoided and critical intangibles — centred on leadership, competencies and work cultures — are overlooked precisely because they are difficult to quantify.

The delivery approach spearheaded by the project management office in our presidency has been effective because these intangibles are allowed to flourish. Risk-taking, flexibility, responsiveness and the ability to co-ordinate complex, criss-crossing relationships and organisations are the lifeblood of its success.

It is crucial not to stifle this dynamic approach with the usual institutional mechanisms to which governments are accustomed. The challenge for governments is therefore to find institutional accommodation of these special organisational responses, rather than co-opting them into the existing frameworks that are ill-suited to the era ahead.

This article was originally featured in the Business Day

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The relief from load-shedding — now at more than 50 days and counting — has unleashed much speculation about the reason. It is appropriate, therefore, that we lift the lid on the inner workings of the national energy crisis committee (NECOM) and provide some insight into what it has taken place in the 21 months since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the Energy Action Plan (EAP).

But it is also appropriate to start with a caveat: load-shedding has not ended, but we are now seeing a huge amount of collective effort to produce visible results. There are two components to why Necom is making a difference — one is the way we’re working and the other is what we are doing.

The progress we’re seeing pivots on using the leadership and authority of the presidency to convene and co-ordinate those who are directly responsible for implementing the EAP, and to inject urgency and accountability into the process. This is managed through Necom’s governance arrangement supported by a team in the presidency, which is constantly monitoring, measuring and unblocking problems.

This is an approach rooted in international practice, where the centre of government takes the oversight responsibility for delivery. The focus is usually on well-defined priorities whose complexity and cross-cutting character make it difficult for a single state entity to co-ordinate the implementation. What differentiates the Necom effort is the scale of the problem and the programme, as well as the level of urgency. This motivated a governance structure akin to the Covid-19 response.

When Ramaphosa took office in 2019, he immediately set about establishing delivery oversight with dedicated teams, such as Operation Vulindlela, to ensure that the government fulfils its commitments. Delivery oversight and co-ordination from the centre of government, coupled with strong collaboration with social partners, have been a cornerstone of this administration. This approach has paid off and there is tangible improvement through the efforts of the presidency, Necom and dedicated Eskom staff. It is only fair that we recognise the progress and the people — many behind the scenes — who have contributed to the results we are seeing today.

What is Necom exactly? It is a state structure for good reason. Some of its work is confidential, such as the work on criminal syndicates in coal and cable theft. An open forum would undoubtedly stifle the frank and difficult discussions within government that are needed to break logjams. That said, there are strong interlinkages with key external parties, such as Business for SA (B4SA) and a host of energy experts. This is directly linked to the business collaborative initiative of the president, where organised business leaders meet him and other government and state-owned enterprise leaders on the progress being made by the energy, logistics and security crisis committees.

As was the case during the Covid-19 pandemic, business plays a special role in funding the expertise that Necom requires. It raised R100m for energy, managed through a new vehicle, the resource mobilisation fund. This means that Necom is able to quickly commission legal and energy experts to support its workstreams — for example, in areas critical to private generators being able to sell their power, such as wheeling, feed-in tariffs and grid access. It has also provided the channel for B4SA to provide pro bono expertise to Eskom’s coal-powered stations.

Necom has served as a crucial platform to build the relationships that ensure the relevant parties come to the table and do what is necessary. Not unexpectedly, we started with a conglomeration of naysayers, and the major outcomes we sought, like an increase in the energy availability factor, eluded us. Despite the difficult journey since July 2022, the president continues to insist that we stay the course.

Fortunately, there were early wins to demonstrate the value of the way we work. This included the establishment of an Energy One-Stop Shop and the clearing of unnecessary procurement impediments, such as enabling Eskom to procure original equipment manufacturer (OEM) expertise and supplies. And once the debt relief programme came into play, Eskom had sufficient funds for plant maintenance.

Eskom found itself in the unusual position of having a third party — Necom — with line of sight into its operations with consistent monitoring of its progress but not interfering in its day-to-day operations. Not an easy relationship in any circumstance. But we balanced this with direct support to Eskom’s corporate strategy, such as clearing regulatory hurdles to operationalising the National Transmission Company of SA. Out of this has emerged an Eskom relationship with Necom that is open (allowing access to detailed data) and flexible, with senior executives who are supportive and active in all Necom structures.

The crisis provided a unique impetus to reform. This is where the EAP focus has been crucial. It requires more than fixing failing power plants and allows for much-needed reforms to the power sector to be initiated under the Necom umbrella.

Instead of first formulating a full-blown reform strategy, Necom took the approach of being action driven. The first and most critical step was the removal of the licensing requirement for private generators. Since then, we have targeted specific measures important to enabling the early development of a power market.

The quick wins came from regulatory changes — timelines were shortened and regulations amended. For example, renewable energy projects no longer require environmental impact assessments for areas of low and medium environmental sensitivities. The government’s one-stop shop streamlines regulatory approvals. Now, the focus is the wheeling of power, tariff systems, grid access and the development of a wholesale market code.

These reforms have resulted in large-scale investment in renewable energy. There is a pipeline of at least 22GW that we track through Necom.

We continue to build on the success of Necom, making quick corrections to mistakes. The agility of Necom, with its collaborative approach, has led to significant market confidence. Driving energy reform and ending load-shedding have received an overall thumbs up and increased confidence from ordinary people, investors and developers.

Our work is not done but we are on the right track.

Baleni is director-general in the presidency and secretary of the cabinet and chairs the NECOM technical committee.

This article was originally published in Business Day

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Rely on Jacob Zuma to jolt us from lethargy. Amid the many mundane manifestos his newbie party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), pulls a rabbit out the hat and promises to force SA’s corporations to list on the JSE. Who would have thought?

And there is probably no-one more surprised than the JSE itself to find such an ally to improve its listings.

From the rest of the electoral catwalk there are few surprises or new ideas about what will resolve our biggest problems — lack of growth and jobs amid a glaring chasm of inequality. We hear often that there are no silver bullets — let alone new ones. We all know what has to be done, the issue is the doing.

Given that getting the public service to deliver better is my business, I can’t argue with that. But before “doing”, it’s really important to get strategic clarity and focus on what matters most. Zuma’s legacy has left us with a long list. The key is to pare it down to what is achievable and what will have catalytic impact.

Just revitalising our public infrastructure would certainly be catalytic — and few parties have missed out on this. What else could be a golden thread that we can weave through our flawed economic fabric and achieve the glow we are all seeking? There is one thing that is a favourite but invariably off the mark. That is SMEs. In reality, the M — medium-sized business — is silent. Yet it is just this that is so critical to transforming our economy. 

A key reason our economy is structurally distorted lies in the prevalence of the extremes — the large corporations that dominate our growth numbers, and the sea of small and micro enterprises that survive so precariously. Our structural problem is that the middle is missing.

Why not make the medium enterprise the golden thread of economic policy?

The hardest thing for a small company is to reach maturity and transition to the middle rung. The most robust economies have a well-sized middle. So, could we not catalyse our economy by benchmarking our economic strategy to suit the requirements of medium-sized companies?

Too many of our policies are designed with the large corporate in mind, and with the small enterprise treated as a sidebar. A growing and enthusiastic middle class is an important corollary. Here is the primary feeding ground for entrepreneurs, another area of poor performance in SA.

Why not make the medium enterprise the golden thread of economic policy? Leading global entrepreneurship researcher Scott Shane argues that “to get more economic growth by having more start-ups, new companies would need to be more productive than existing companies. But they are not… The results show that productivity increases with firm age… and, “as whole, new firms have net job destruction after their first year” and “jobs in new firms pay less, offer worse fringe benefits, and provide less job security than jobs in existing firms”.

His thesis is that policy should focus on high growth firms. On the whole, these are the medium-sized firms that have matured enough to be sustainable, but not enough to have lost their youthful energy for high growth. It’s in the middle that our greatest chance of resolving the jobs crisis can be found, and yet it’s here that the least attention is paid.

As such, it would be worthwhile to establish what economic and labour policies are helping or hindering the growth and performance of medium-sized firms, and then on that basis pursue a few priority policy changes.

The power sector provides a worthwhile example of just how one critical reform created an avalanche of activity, even before the necessary subsequent reforms had come into play. This was the removal of the licence requirement for any private sector renewable energy developments. Now, more than 100 projects, for about 10,000MW, have been registered with energy regulator Nersa, since the first phase of the reform in 2021.

Since this reform, the National Energy Crisis Committee has been chipping away at blockages and other reform measures that will allow a fully fledged energy market. This experience can be applied to create the right space for a business structure that has a strong middle — the girth of a gogo — and a well-supported through-flow of small enterprises.

This article was originally featured in the Business Day

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Hosted by the South Africa Monitoring and Evaluation Association, this will be an opportunity to discuss enhancing performance in Government.

Zoom link for the event: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87071079002?pwd=VHJHc2NZaEFER1lnL2lhOWtna3g1dz09

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Published by the Democracy Development Program, the book unpacks sub-national governance and development in South Africa post 1994.

Click here to download a copy of the chapter.

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Jenny Cargill

Recently, Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Khanyago spoke of the “execution deficit” within the government — just like a banker.

But if we think about our most recent and urgent need for the state to respond and deliver effectively — notably, to be protected from the outburst of looting and violence — the national commentary is justifiably far less polite about the performance of our government.

Whichever way it is said, South Africans have been stripped of their confidence as an achieving nation. We get through things — and we have done it very well in the past. Our transition to democracy is testimony to that — we pulled ourselves back from the brink and adopted an exemplary constitution, to which we can add four Nobel Peace laureates that affirm a national ability to produce exceptional leaders.

And yet today, we find ourselves wallowing. 

This makes Sir Michael Barber’s book, Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things, resonate. It lays out what it takes to recover and achieve ambitious goals in complicated environments. Barber’s global brand draws from his experience in government — as the title from his previous book explains, How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy. 

Under former UK prime minister Tony Blair, Barber led the world’s first specialist delivery unit, run from the prime minister’s office. It was a successful effort at getting some real results that mattered to people — for example, getting trains to run on time and reducing waiting times in emergency departments.

Today, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is drawing on this approach.  

Barber has written extensively on his UK experience and that of other governments. In Accomplishment, he takes a different tack. He considers achievement across many fields of endeavour — art, science, business, elite sport and public service. As he puts it, he varies from “the grand and epic to the purely personal”.

This range has allowed my own work to be featured. Helen Zille heard about Barber’s successes under Blair, looked at how he did it, and appointed me to lead a unit akin to Barber’s which produced a different way of doing business in government with some exceptional results achieved. Particularly important was the rollout of e-learning to 1-million learners that enabled the Western Cape school system to adapt better than others to the remote-learning requirements of Covid lockdowns. 

What interested me most in the book is the tapestry of accomplishment that criss-crosses a soprano singer; Olympiad sports stars; scientists; geniuses; political leaders; and a 17th century Quaker woman, Mary Fisher, with whom he starts his story. He finds a pattern to accomplishment and, in that, he brings out the human side much more than he has done in his previous writings.

Technique is important, but it is the person and the people who make the difference. As he weaves through the stories and insights of his subjects, one cannot help but project onto SA.  How does Ramaphosa fare within these patterns of accomplishment? And can we find an alchemy to achievement amid bureaucratic mediocrity?

Barber highlights the value in building coalitions, prioritising and having dedicated delivery expertise. The president scores on these, after a slow start. But there are more elements to success, like the importance of a good team (which Ramaphosa surely lacks even after his recent cabinet reshuffle).

Throughout his stories, Barber keeps coming back to open-mindedness, not being overconfident, avoiding dogma, meticulous attention to detail and facing “the brutal truth”.

These are not the hallmarks of our current political leadership, who could draw pertinent lessons from Punjab’s former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif. He started from a “shockingly low base”, but instead of giving up, he “started with the one component of leadership capacity he had control over — himself”. He never let up, he browbeat and yelled with moral fervour (not, as Barber says, a case study for management handbooks). Relatively quickly, his priority, education, improved — schools got electricity, water and toilets; teachers pitched up for class; and decent textbooks were printed and distributed. 

A similar myopic focus stood behind the success of the British Olympics team. In 2012, Britain, the host, won more medals than it had ever done. They could have rested on their laurels, but UK Sports “decided that history should inspire rather than inhibit them”.  They went on to win more medals at Rio in 2016. “How? For a start, they prioritised ruthlessly.” For Barber, real accomplishment is never possible without prioritisation.

Barber’s early reputation was built on the use of a few key metrics and real-time data to improve impact.  In this book, he is cautious about the adherence to the term “evidence-based policy or strategy”, preferring instead “evidence-informing”. The reason is that our choices and decisions never draw from evidence alone.

As he notes, both analytics and creativity are needed to prosper — as well as an ability to convince people of the veracity of the evidence. He traces the success of Galileo for uncovering “the truth in the heavens” and his failure to be believed. This is as much a story about the hard-sell of evidence (think of the anti-vaxxers today), as it is about the prickly and not so generous spirit of Galileo that curtailed the acceptance and effect of his telescopic discoveries of space.

Many stories are told, and many are fascinating in themselves, but Barber’s purpose is to find the common threads of accomplishment. The book achieves that, with ease of readability. 

Buy a copy of the book

This article was originally featured in the Business Day

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The minibus taxi industry says a lot about SA. In the recent week of frenzied looting and violence it became both the upholder and the enemy of the rule of law.

In the Western Cape, an all-too-familiar taxi war was claiming lives and grounding services. In KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the taxi industry stepped in to stop the looting wrecking ball, with communities confident it would do the job. After all, it successfully delivers millions of people daily to wherever they need to go.

These counterpositions underscore the state of governance in SA. The seven days of unimpeded looting and violence provided a full, concentrated exposure of the state’s failure to be responsive to citizens and do what it is supposed to do. Cape Town’s taxi war, which continues to ground commuters, is one of many in a series with the same theme. But we’ve become inured to the repetitiveness and instead look to high drama to activate action. 

Therefore, we ask whether the sheer scale of the devastation that so rapidly engulfed KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng will be enough to jolt government leaders and the bureaucracy out of their lethargy. The short answer is possibly, but the probability is low.

Commentators have been saying for some time that clear, directed action, exercised with urgency and accountability, is overdue. The punch-drunk economy after Jacob Zuma’s presidency needs an effective crisis response, even more so with Covid-19 and joblessness careering out of control. But it has not been forthcoming.

Clearly, a state that cannot deliver cannot manage a crisis. So what is the president doing, or not doing, and what could he be doing, to bring capability to the state? If a clear path to a modicum of a delivery-ready government cannot be marked out, then as commentator Gareth van Onselen has written, what is the point of having a government?

Cyril Ramaphosa started his presidency on the promise of better implementation and collaboration. “Delivery” is the new speak of government, and there is a growing number of collectively agreed implementation plans. But these plans are being fed back into a bureaucracy that is largely missing in action, allowing only marginal traction.

There are several potential responses to the current violence that need to be treated with caution. One is to get caught up in high-level leadership gatherings to craft a new vision to repair the breakdown in our social compact. Another is to resort to broad turnaround strategies to fix the public sector (which is so amorphous that nothing will happen), or to do the opposite and take too narrow an approach of training officials (building a capable state needs more than fixing a skills deficit among too many ill-placed appointees).

The most productive response would be to narrow the focus to what matters most and can be delivered. This is an approach the president has started to adopt. What is important now is not to be distracted but to create clarity on what it takes to achieve a well-functioning delivery system and tackle the gaps and weaknesses.

So far the attention has been on the economic renewal programme. Specific priorities have been selected with dedicated delivery capability, centred on Operation Vulindlela. Success has been achieved rapidly in the game-changing decision to free up private generation of electricity.

But in this achievement a key weakness was exposed, and it is the one that is the golden thread to effective delivery — the political leadership and how it behaves and performs. Here there needs to be commitment, capability and coherence. Without that, the hard choices and clarity of purpose that is needed will invariably be sidestepped by vested and factional interests, or by simply being too vague and inchoate.

Former finance minister Trevor Manuel picked up on that in a recent webinar of the Centre for Development and Enterprise. He spoke of the cabinet as “a confederation of Tzarism” — ministers in effect making their own mandates. He pinpointed mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, who had sought to minimise the role of the private sector and renewable energy in resolving the escalating energy crisis.

Mantashe drew a line at 10MW of embedded generation by a private operator without a licence. The president had a very different view, and with the support of Operation Vulindlela eventually managed to extract a 100MW limit. If every priority and target must be fought for in this manner, we need to be worried.

Once past such political hurdles, the even bigger one of actual implementation looms. For the 100MW threshold, the big plus is the role of the private sector — it will deliver the power. But before getting there, the department of mineral resources & energy, the National Energy Regulator of SA, Eskom and the country’s mostly dysfunctional municipalities must deliver regulations and other enablers.

If this is simply left in their hands, business-as-usual will prevail. There is a need for interventions at this level, giving the centre of government a clear line of sight to the actual delivery and the necessary oversight to ensure it happens.

There is established global practice for this high-level executive oversight of public sector performance. It requires committed and attentive political leadership, and if done properly injects accountability, transparency and urgency into otherwise low- or nonresponsive bureaucracies.

So far, there has been little evidence of SA’s politicians understanding their integral role in ensuring better delivery outcomes. Instead, their pattern of spasmodic responses to just about everything runs counter to a delivery culture — and this has bled down into the bureaucracy.

What does all this mean for the possibility and probability of a substantive response to the latest crisis? Continuing with the example of energy, the president’s approach of prioritising and putting dedicated expertise behind delivering results provides room for possibility.

However, the probability remains low without a different leadership cohort that can make the necessary focused strategic choices, stand by them and harness capability to do what is necessary to get SA off the trajectory of crisis.

That’s the really difficult part for Ramaphosa — and, no doubt, he will have to improvise.

This article was originally featured in the Business Day

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StatsSA data shows that approximately 37% of South African households have consistent access to the internet through cell phones or computers. Furthermore, a 16 percentage point differential exists between the extent to which private school learners compared to public school learners were able to seamlessly transition to an online learning environment when COVID-19 struck (83.5% private versus 67.1% public school learners)¹.

The COVID-19 pandemic not only magnifies the prevailing digital divide from a schooling perspective but also raises the interdependency with the national broadband roll out as prioritised through SA Connect.

Strategy Execution Adviser’s (SEA’s) work spans both topics of e-Education and Broadband deployment: first through our intricate involvement in the roll-out of the eLearning Game Changer in the Western Cape Government between 2016 and 2019, and more recently leading the development of the rapid Broadband deployment framework for Gauteng province. I will reflect on some of our key lessons, in response to the mitigating measures instituted by the national government as far as primary education is concerned.

On the positive front, the pandemic surfaced pockets of excellence², with several projects championed by the National government to minimise the disruption of lockdown. This included:

1. offering virtual lessons on dedicated education channels (i.e. channel 180 on DSTV) and broadcasting lessons via community radio stations countrywide.
2. partnering with private network providers to offer zero-rated applications and educational websites.
3. launching a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) lockdown digital school in partnership with Africa Teen Geeks. Utilising both social media and the Department of Basic Education (DBE) website meant learners could access lessons free of cost, any time of the day.

These COVID-19 specific projects follow from President Ramaphosa’s commitment in 2019 to provide every child in South Africa with a tablet device. The intent was to implement this plan in three phases, with phase 1 targeting multigrade, multiphase, farm and some rural schools.  An opportunity exists to not treat the COVID-19 initiatives as stop-gap solutions but to bring the various efforts together, thereby affecting much needed systemic change.

Our work to date offers valuable insights around the practicalities of rolling out eLearning at scale³. The most pertinent lessons are as follow: 

• Firstly, there is the need for a holistic approach to rolling out eLearning that encompass the technical elements (i.e. infrastructure, technology, digital content, capacity building and administration systems) as well as ‘softer’ support factors (i.e. commitment, leadership and change management). In turn, each of these elements consists of many “cogs” that need to move together to achieve the desired results. For example, in rolling out technology – not only did the suitable devices needed to be procured, but also the accompanying software and the maintenance ensured. Security also needed careful consideration and all devices were subsequently branded to deter criminals. School security was also tightened. Connecting these devices to the internet was another hurdle we encountered with learners needing to go through two login processes to access the internet. Another critical cog in ensuring a high quality ‘user experience’ was the expansion of the school help desk. By keeping a close eye on all these different pieces, the majority of technology and infrastructure targets were achieved. But even more important, the data showed an increased use of ICT by teachers (52% of teachers in 2018 compared to 16% a year earlier⁴). Some of the technology and infrastructure related successes achieved in the eLearning programme are as follows:
  • Over 90% of schools (1250 schools) had broadband access by the end of the Game Changer period, while 435 schools received LANS (local area networks), and another 945 schools had wireless access points
  • 7,530 Smart Classrooms were installed, and 66% of teachers⁵ were teaching in these technology enabled classrooms by November 2018
  • 1,160 schools equipped with Slim (Computer) Labs
  • Help Desk efficiencies constantly checked and improved so that by end 2018, 89% of queries were resolved within 5 working days.
• It took considerable effort and resources to get quality connectivity in place: broadband downtime and line speed were tracked continuously and hands-on leadership interventions, such as Premier visits schools to investigate persistent problems were just some of the interventions undertaken to address this problem. This led to a centralised help desk to ensure rapid resolution of problems, which themselves were multi-faceted. 
• Third, use as much real-time data and other evidence as possible to maintain progress and problem-solve. For example, the ‘user-experience’ was assessed continuously via surveys to teachers. It took both data and feet-on-the-ground to solve the many problems that emerged in checking the ‘user experience’.  
• Finally, the roll-out of the various elements must be sequenced appropriately. The access to infrastructure and technology was tackled first, followed by the relevant digital content and appropriate capacity building initiatives. This does not suggest that the one element has to be completed for the other to commence, instead it speaks to the need to develop action plans that accommodates the dependency between various elements and ensuring delivery happens as planned. For example, train teachers on specific technologies just before they receive these technologies and not months in advance so knowledge is retained – it seems obvious, but believe me, not in practice.

Overall, our experience suggests that simply providing tablets, or providing digital content will not enhance teaching and learning. A piecemeal approach leads to inefficiencies and limited impact – action is needed on multiple fronts, supported by strong delivery capabilities to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved.

And, as South Africa aims to break the digital divide and bring connectivity to under-serviced areas, the eLearning experience offers a wealth of lessons on what it takes to achieve such ambition on the ground and to have real impact. 

[1] StatsSA data extracted from Mail & Guardian article titled: Covid-19 exposes South Africa’s digital literacy divide”

[2] These “pockets of excellence” were extracted from an article by David Mhlanga and Tankiso Moloi.  For a more detailed reflection on the educational initiatives undertaken during COVID-19 refer to the full article

[3] The eLearning programme targeted 1500 public ordinary schools which translates into 30 000 teachers and 1500 000 learners

[4] Data collected from a sample of teachers (N = 1000) in November 2017 and again in November 2018

[5] Data collected from a sample of teachers (N = 1000) in November 2017 and again in November 2018

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