Ubuntu Pathways: Building from the ground up
South Africa's problems were never going to be fixed in 30 years
Naively, I had never thought about charities as providing long-term, scalable solutions to South Africa’s problems. While they do incredible work, I’d always thought self-sustaining projects were a requirement for long-term solutions to problems. That was until I came across Ubuntu Pathways. Founded by American, Jacob Lief (“Jake”) and Gqeberha (formally Port Elizabeth) local, Malizole “Banks” Gwaxula, the Gqeberha-based community organisation started out in schools offering top-up courses, before creating their own standalone health and education institutions. They now have a sprawling complex including a health centre, a primary school, and a future high school is planned as well. The Ubuntu model is ambitious in its mission of impacting the full lifecycle of kids’ lives from before pre-school until they have a job vs the regular single-intervention method employed by most charities. Running for 24 years now, they are a remarkable story of taking a long-term view to solving societal problems and not being scared of the private sector as a funding mechanism along the way.
South Africa post-1994 was never going to be a quick fix. While people were rightly optimistic following the avoidance of a civil war, the reality on the ground was a country with 15 million people with poor (if any) education, limited access to healthcare, living in homes outside of cities with patchy access to water and electricity. On top of this, the country was effectively a one-party state, with the ANC sitting atop a resounding majority and unlikely to get challenged for the foreseeable future. This created all the wrong incentives within the government, making it improbable that the country would be fixed within a generation. Indeed, this is exactly what played out.
South Africa was in a unique mess after apartheid and needed unique solutions to solve it. While food parcels, building schools, clinics and other spot aid are great, what was really needed was a deep understanding of the holistic problem facing young people in large parts of South Africa, then solving it piece by piece.
Finding the problem
You hear many stories of people from abroad travelling around South Africa post ’94 and being equally struck by the beauty of the country and its people, while being horrified by the scars of the past. One such person was Jake. Jake arrived as part of a university project to work with a Cape Town organisation but suspected that the founder was more interested in his own status than he was on real impact. So he left and went up to Gqeberha where he ran into Banks in a bar – and that’s where the journey really began. I am not going to focus on the early part of the journey, which is covered well in Jake’s book and Ubuntu’s website, but over the following year, Jake was welcomed warmly into the community by Banks, fell in love with the township and when back in the US, couldn’t scratch his itch of wanting to make a lasting impact on the township community. It didn’t take long before he had fully committed to this journey, raised his first funds, and bought books for the local school where Banks worked. Next up was a computer centre, with a plan to scale as many computer centres as possible around Gqeberha. Making an impact was easy right?
Wrong. Training didn’t stick and needed to be repeated over and over. General digital literacy was low, making fancy computers impractical, and this was all irrelevant when the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit and wiped out many of the kids’ parents (it’s easy to forget how bad this pandemic was, killing c. 3m people almost exclusively from poorer areas). This was a single example of an important overarching lesson that Jake, Banks and the Ubuntu team learned from when setting up the organisation as it runs today, and it is one that resonates more broadly when thinking about South Africa’s current problems. The lesson was that attempting to solve a single problem that a child faces, ends up solving nothing if that child is sitting with a litany of other day-to-day problems that make the solution to the single problem irrelevant.
For instance, if three independent charities are set up which provide a child with access to a computer lab, a meal once a day and ad hoc educational assistance, that won’t sustainably solve anything if that same child’s parents die while they are very young, they are abused at home, have no access to electricity and running water, or all of the above. This is the reality of many of South Africa’s townships, where unemployment runs over 70% and abuse and death are common. The reality is that to impact these children’s lives you need to solve all these problems through one holistic intervention and not by breaking them down into discrete problems and solving them independently of one another. “Depth rather than breadth” as Ubuntu describes it.
The private sector will solve it
Another common belief is that if the government would just focus on the absolute basics (reduce corruption, improve physical infrastructure, and have a base level of competence), the private sector would solve these problems. Once again, for South Africa, this is not true. In a capitalist system, funding flows for projects or businesses that will generate a return. Areas of South Africa that are an enduring legacy of the Group Areas Act have no capital and thus will not be uplifted by a capitalist system. It’s akin to a local minimum in statistics where the system will stay as it is (even if that place is sub-optimal) unless forced in another direction by non-market forces. ‘That’s government’s job to solve’ would be the obvious push-back, but that’s also not quite right. Yes, government could build schools, train teachers, and provide electricity, but as I’ve mentioned earlier, these discrete solutions do not solve anything for children that are routinely abused at home, or orphaned at a young age or are born with HIV.
What you need, as Banks and Jake realized early on, are well funded organisations whose mandate is to provide a stable environment for children stuck in this local minimum, from the cradle until they are supporting themselves. This is an incredibly daunting task, requiring dedicated work over 10 – 20 years per child (also too long for election-cycle driven politics). This is what Ubuntu became, and their model is to create a pathway out of the poverty and abuse that these children are often subjected to.
What they physically built was a building (now campus) in the middle of a Gqeberha township, which included a medical centre, computer centre, pharmacy and rooftop garden. They followed with a primary school a few years later and are planning a high school in the coming years. The building is far more than a physical structure. It symbolizes that (a) townships can house world-class, beautiful facilities, (b) Ubuntu is a permanent fixture and (c) Ubuntu’s is a long-term commitment to the people of the township. What they have ended up facilitating is an end-to-end service for children, or ‘clients’ as they refer to them, who need it most. While they do provide the typical one-off intervention facilities that you would expect (meals, clothes, textbooks, learning support, medicine), they also provide a platform for whatever each individual child needs. If a child is feeling scared at home, they know where to go. If their parents/guardians die or abandon them, they know where to go. If they are generally going through a tough time, they know where to go. Ubuntu (with the assistance of the broader community who buy into the project) draw a parallel with filling the gaps of a parent role for these children where they can’t get it elsewhere, and empowering parents to know how best to support their child, which is not something that government or the private sector is set up to do. But it is exactly what these children need in order to get a ‘regular’ shot at life.
The results are both impressive in terms of their impact, and depressing when compared with any parts of life where the Ubuntu system doesn’t reach. The average child that grows up in a township environment with no intervention falls off a cliff in terms of faculties of reasoning, literacy, and mathematics from a very early age (as early as 4/5) from which there is no part of the system that allows them to recover. The results in healthcare are similar with respect to TB and administering of HIV retroviral drugs. The result of this is an endless loop of poverty, lack of skills and the continuation of the local minimum that I spoke about earlier. One-time interventions (weekly meals, etc) make no dent in this.
The Ubuntu Impact
Ubuntu, however, has shown great success. They usually start out with children at a very early age (ideally from birth) and provide direct all-around support, throughout primary school, and high school. Ubuntu stays involved all the way until they graduate, assisting in finding a job, but a big part of this journey, in particular high school, is still currently managed through public education.
To focus on education, by the time children graduate from Ubuntu’s early years programme and enter their primary school, Ubuntu clients are on-par with the international standards for reasoning and literacy. Non-Ubuntu children are already 2 years behind and they never recover. As soon as Ubuntu clients hit the public school system, their progress deteriorates, albeit they are always a number of years ahead of their non-Ubuntu compatriots. Ubuntu has been through this with c. 2,000 clients, the majority of which graduated from high school and got jobs. The net impact of this is massive. McKinsey did a study in which they estimated that every dollar that Ubuntu receives in funding, translates into just under $9 of benefit to society (comprising of their earnings, the people they will be able to support, as well as all of the government subsidy and grant savings that are made). The next generation can now look up and see hope where previously there was none. Having been at it for 24 years, these findings provide evidence for a few key principles:
There is nothing fundamentally different between a child born in the township and one born into a privileged family. This sounds obvious, but unfortunately is often not the view taken by a lot of people on the outside looking in.
Ubuntu’s system works and there is a path out of this ‘local minimum’, or cycle of poverty that most born into townships are trapped in.
Ubuntu’s system was effective even before Ubuntu had their own primary school or high school. Their first class of (their own) primary school kids will be graduating next year, and their literacy standards are on par with the top schools in the country. The deeper Ubuntu’s interventions go, the greater and longer lasting impact they have on these children.
It’s important to note that getting to this point took Ubuntu 20+ years, with Jake, Banks and the team working like any other startup would (80-hour weeks, constant problem solving, learning, and evolving). They also adapted Ubuntu’s ‘product’ to their specific environment, which they stress is subtly different from any other South African township (no two communities are the same). As such, you cannot scale this solution directly. You can’t just drop this same building into every township in the country, hire a bunch of people to run it and expect results to flow immediately. What this does show though, is that there is a solution to what some describe as intractable problems that South Africa faces.
The solution is to find a way of funding similar long-term focused community organisations that act like platforms that touch every part of the community. On top of these, you can plug in all the necessary (but not sufficient on their own) single-intervention charities that are operating in these areas. This will make their impact long-term instead of immediate but with no lasting impact. It is naïve to think that one can apply first world solutions to problems that are unique to South Africa. The solutions sit in listening to individual communities and having long-term organisations like Ubuntu in place that manage a 10-20-year journey with a child. How you fund this, recruit individuals to do what are incredibly difficult jobs and audit the results is a separate challenge, but at least you’d be focusing on solutions that actually show evidence of working.
BEE done right
Ubuntu itself is now a large organisation, employing over 100 people. They are funded through collection of donor capital from around the world, which is still vital to them, along with for-profit entities that participate in BEE deals. with any profits flowing to Ubuntu to be used in the running of the business. Any organisation that relies on constant fundraising to function is not ideal, as if half your time is spent stressing about funding, you have less time to actually make an impact. The point of BEE was to re-balance South Africa’s capital that sat in all-white hands during apartheid, to a fairer split post-apartheid, without straight up expropriating these companies. This has in large part turned into a tax on all companies that operate in South Africa, with usually a politically connected individual taking part of the profit, getting rich themselves without benefitting the majority of the population (and of course bankers charging hefty fees for putting the deals together). This plan evidently didn’t work with the Gini co-efficient rising from 0.58 in 1994 to 0.73 in 2005 – largely due to the rich getting richer and the poor staying the same.
Ubuntu has shown a smarter way of making this impact. If you could take a portion of companies’ profits and direct them to organisations making long-term impacts on communities that are still suffering from apartheid, the private sector could effectively fill the gap that a government running on 5-year election cycles cannot.
The government itself is starting to realise the benefits of such organisations as well. When Covid hit, the department of health asked Ubuntu to be their delivery partner for PPE, vaccines and other care, to those affected in Gqeberha. Ubuntu was uniquely placed to do this, being tightly integrated with the community as a whole. This shows the benefit of the platform approach again – it’s versatility. Vaccine delivery was simply rolled on top of Ubuntu’s current infrastructure and made it entirely feasible to deliver the 45,000 vaccines that they did. In most townships, zero vaccines were delivered as there was no infrastructure to do so.
The Broader Ubuntu Impact
Although Ubuntu is focused on its own work in the township, they are so often asked for advice and guidance on how to set up similar organisations that they set up an advisory arm to share their learnings of the past 24 years more widely. Although the implementation will be different in every community, the playbook they used to go about building Ubuntu is very relevant for others to avoid making the same mistakes that they did along the way. They also work closely with Siya Kolisi’s foundation, which focuses on sport as a way to uplift children, as well as others that they can plug into their platform, or provide guidance to along the way.
Should the ruling party start taking its role of governing more seriously in South Africa, which there is a chance they will do as political opposition for the first time is a real threat to the ANC’s dominance, these learnings will also be critical to any parties that want to listen.
Ubuntu deserves much praise for what it has achieved in Gqeberha township. Not only should they attract capital like a successful company would, but they also need to be brought to the forefront of South Africa’s consciousness as a beacon of success that others should take note of. More generally, it’s time for South Africa to stop banging its head against the wall and thinking that ‘reducing regulation’, ‘removing corruption’ or ‘growing the economy’ will solve all its problems. They won’t. Large parts of South Africa are still a total mess from apartheid, and it’ll take long-term, well-funded community organisations focusing on children’s lives from cradle to job to solve it. Ubuntu has shown the way.