Ikamva Labantwana Bethu

The ultimate mission of Ikamva Labantwana Bethu is to transform the
township of Crossroads and surrounding townships, from being the murder
capitals and high crime rating townships to being a place of peace, a
place where kids have access to quality education and a place where the
out-of-school youth are equipped with soft and hard skills.

The tools of transformation in this vision are education, skills development, and employment creation for the youth and adults of Crossroads and its
neighboring townships. This is to place a better future trajectory for what currently looks so bleak.

The organisation’s director and founder is responsible for guiding and directing the mission and vision of the organisation, which is to provide children from Crossroads with additional academic support to help them achieve outstanding grades, improve their social skills, and acquire English language proficiency. The organisation offers three programmes for young children and youth.  In 2012, the academic programme for 9- to 12-year-olds was introduced, then in 2018 skills development programme for out-of-school youth, and community development initiatives for Crossroads Townships and neighbouring communities were introduced as additional programmes in response to other community needs. The director is responsible for managing and overseeing the primary leadership team of the organisation in regard to project management, implementation, monitoring, and stakeholder management. In addition to overseeing daily operations, the director collaborates closely with board members on governance, financial supervision, and policy development. Also, responsible for fundraising and contributing to the organization's development and positive impact on the lives of the children and youth of Crossroads and surrounding communities.  

Since 2012, we have been implementing our education programme for children in primary schools, and we are now in a position to define our education intervention in order to effect the intended change. We have experimented with various approaches over the course of these years, and we are now seeking the most effective solution and strategy to implement in our academic programme in order to help students better their language, reading, mathematics, science, and computer skills. We seek a comprehensive education programme that will improve students' academic skills and abilities. We have collaborated with education partners who have implemented their education initiatives with us, only to withdraw or cease operations due to funding difficulties. Now is the moment to define a fully-fledged, organization-owned education support programme that has been proven effective and can produce the desired education outcomes. Two senior staff members have been leading our education programme for four to seven years, while the director has been leading the programme for eleven years. We are passionate about education development and assisting young children in achieving academic success, engaging them in after-school programmes and supporting them through primary level education while bad habits are beginning to solidify and training them to become high-achieving and committed learners.

We address educational gaps as they appear and assist learners from high-crime communities establish good study habits and strong characters. 

Our academic programme was founded on the idea that vulnerable children and high-potential learners from Crossroads Township should have access to academic mentors who will help them improve their academic performance and maintain excellent grades in order to attend high schools with better reputations. In 2003, Siviwe Dlukwana lost his older sibling in a gang-related incident. His older sibling attended the local high school and had so much potential, but he succumbed to peer pressure and lacked direction due to the social environment. Siviwe believes that if his sibling had participated in an additional academic programme, such as an after-school programme, his potential could have been channeled in a positive manner, resulting in his performing well in school and gaining access to more opportunities that would have allowed him to reach greater heights.

Due to crime, and a lack of development as a result of apartheid, there are no other education programmes operating at the grassroots level in places like Crossroads.  Siviwe founded ILB to give children from Crossroads a better experience, where they will receive academic assistance, be matched with positive tutors and mentors, be assisted to study in higher-performing high schools where they will be guided through their high school journey, and be assisted in applying to and studying at universities. Siviwe is familiar with the difficulties of growing up in a place like Crossroads, and he was able to obtain a scholarship after graduating from primary school to attend LEAP School, one of the top-performing schools for students in Cape Town, where he was supported until he passed matric with a full exemption and qualified to attend university. Through our education programme for primary school children, we hope to help them realise their full potential at a young age and excel in all aspects of their schoolwork, as well as develop computer, art, and social skills. This programme is assisting us in increasing the number of competent children and closing the educational disparities that exist in our communities as a result of inadequate educational opportunities.

ILB embraces learning variability at different levels. We recognise that our beneficiaries come from a variety of backgrounds and attend a variety of schools, which makes up for or influences their learning pace. We employ a variety of interventions to ensure that all students are on track academically. On-site, we have a social worker who provides psychosocial support and coaching to our students, academic tutors who assist students six times a week with academic work and homework support, and art practitioners who facilitate twice-weekly workshops in music, dance, African instruments, and visual arts. In addition, we provide workshops on life skills for all learners, as well as a girls club for our adolescent girls, where they learn and discuss openly about girls' issues. We also strive to make learning enjoyable, and we want our programme to be a place where every learner feels at home. Such activities help learners become more receptive to new experiences and give them the confidence to face the challenges they face in their academic work. Working with township-based children, we are well aware of the problems that affect townships, such as poverty, abuse, gangsterism, language barriers, etc. ILB is well placed within the communities it serves to also provide solutions to problems that arise as learners face challenges.

Our organization has conducted formative research; pre–post research and user interviews at Ikamva Labantwana Bethu, in all of the programmes that we offer. Over the past years that we have been in operation in Nyanga and Crossroads township, offering academic support to learners at primary school level, as well as the Skills Development Programme contributed to the youth, we identified, pre–post assessments and user interviews as the best tools to measure the effectiveness and the impact of our programmes. The results that we have collected over the years show that the programmes we offer are helping learners improve their academics, well-being, and behaviour, throughout their academic journey until they reach university. We collected this information through the numerous interviews that we had with our alumni that are now attending university; they confirmed that one of the main reasons they are performing very well is because of the impact of the academic support programme, which we have been offering at our after-school programme for the past 10 years now. The pre-assessments that we always provide to all our beneficiaries in all our programmes give a perspective and an idea of the current existing skills, knowledge and experience relative to our offerings in our programmes. They are also an indicator to us in terms of how to structure programmes, and it is always based on their needs according to the outcome of these pre assessments. The post-assessments indicate to us the change and the transformation that took place during the implementation programme and overall, the effectiveness of the programme. These are also great tools to learn what is working well and what is not, and how we can enrich our programmes to make our programmes better and more effective.

The research has helped us identify shortfalls in our programming. Some pupils do not attend due to various reasons, including family issues or behavioral issues. We have since hired an in-house full-time social worker who assists in addressing such issues as it may be hard for children to speak to their facilitators easily.Equally, we have learned what to keep, such as having extracurricular activities and partnering with organizations that support sporting activities. This is to ensure that children do not get caught up in activities that will lead to the detriment of their future such as gangsterism.

We have also learned the importance of partnership. With Children learn at different paces and are gifted differently. We aim to present education to ensure they all catch up while on the other hand, we give them a platform to express their gifts through music. This also opens other doors for children to not only remain interested in attending classes but also give them a chance to perfect their craft which can be helpful in their near future to earn an income.

We believe there is no better time than this to extend our reach, and really pay attention to detail and the role we are playing in the community of Crossroads and Nyanga. From an organizational perspective, we are stronger than ever and are daily improving our service delivery. In our bid to improve we have identified shortfalls and as such need support to ensure that we reach the next level. The shortfalls have been identified in key/ core areas of the organization such as HR, Facilitation/Capacity Building, Structure of Programmes, Curriculum, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning, Data Collection, and Data Tools.

HR: We want to strengthen our recruitment processes. We want to find answers to answer questions such as how we get quality employees who need limited capacity building and who are able to perform their duties optimally with little or no management. What platforms can we use to get such, etc.

Structure of Programmes: We want to have a coded model and structure that works on its own systematically. Currently, the additions in programmes affect the progress of this because each time a programme is added that affects everything else.

Curriculum: We want to develop an effective and standard curriculum for all our programmes. We are in the process of building them.

MEL: Because of the high number of our programmes and other duties, it is sometimes not easy to pay attention in terms of MEL and oversee all programmes in schools and in-house. We want to build a structure/ system which will aid in MEL of all programmes consistently. We have hired a company that is helping us improve our MEL to some degree and help also strengthen our data collection and improve our data tools.

(1). What is the overall percentage of learners from Ikamva Labantwana’s after-school programme who have accessed the High performing high schools?

(2). How many learners who graduated from our after-care programme managed to pass matric?

(3). How many learners from Ikamva Labantwana pursued Degrees that require Maths and Science such as MBChB (Medicine) and B.Sc.?

Our formative research will be driven by a goal to know how many learners in percentage since the creation of Ikamva Labantwana have accessed the good high schools that produce good marks, how many of these learners passed matric with Maths and Science? How many proceeded to university and graduated? How many of them are in employment? This is evidence-based data that we need to collect and use it to show to Community members, stakeholders, and funders. During these 12 weeks period, we will review our past data, track the participants, interview them document their stories and achievements, and invite them to come back and give back to the organization by being role models, coaching, and motivating the other participants.

Ikamva Labantwana is a community-based organization. One of our aims is to make a change in the lives of community members especially Children and Youth by providing them with education and skills. Therefore, these outputs will be presented to the community members to show them the evidence-based impact of our programmes.

This Evidence-based outputs will be shared with local and international partners by posting these outputs on our all-social media platforms.

These evidence-based outputs will be shared with donors and funders when we submit our reports. Funders need to see where their money is going and for them to see that they need Evidence, to clearly indicate the impact of the programmes that we are running.

The desired short-term - the outcome will be to relieve our staff members from the pressure of conducting research that will be lengthy and prevents them from performing other duties that they are supposed to be performing.

The Long-term outcomes - will be that Ikamva Labantwana will be Implementing programmes that Evidence-based. We will be able to track our Alumni’s and see how far they went with schooling from our after-school programmes to Varsity. This evidence will assist our M&E officer to track our participant's previous participants who will intern come back to the organization to give back and become role models to the current learners of the time.

We can be able to track how many learners from Ikamva Labantwana passed matric with Mathematics and Science and many dropped Maths at Matric, and the next question will be why other learners drop maths at the high school level and how can we address this challenge because it is our vision to see every learner passing matric with Maths.

Our success stories and/or Impact will be evidence-based. We can be able to show in numbers how many learners from our After-school programmes managed to pass Matric and go to University and obtain Degrees.