Welcome – Wamkelekile – O amohetswe
Nelson Mandela founded the Nelson Mandela Institute (NMI) in 2007 to take forward his work in education and rural development in South Africa, and beyond our borders.
The NMI was founded on a partnership between the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Department of Education, and the University of Fort Hare. It is based in the Eastern Cape at the University of Fort Hare – Mr. Mandela’s alma matre. We are a founding partner with UNICEF and the Hamburg Society of the Schools for Africa Campaign.
The NMI works in and through long term partnerships with rural schools and communities. Combining a commitment to social justice with a patience for detailed research, the NMI works to transform education and rural development through applied research, teacher and leadership development, community mobilisation, and building sustainable public institutions.
Sharing some of our work
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Phemba Mfundi 2011
Over the past three years, the Nelson Mandela Institute for Rural Education and Development has been working with 20 schools from the rural outskirts of the Eastern Cape, in Mqanduli near Umtata. These learners are involved in a programme called Phemba Mfundi, which allows them to express themselves in creative writing, with a focus on poetry.
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Phemba Mfundi 2010
We are proud to present the 2nd edition of Phemba mfundi, a journal of learner writing. Like with the first edition we offer un-cut and authentic contributions by rural learners. These contributions reflect subjects rural learners are thinking about, the young people’s developing control of isiXhosa and English languages and genres they are interested and familiar with.
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Magic Classrooms
Following three years of research into the state of education at poor rural and urban schools in South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Institute introduced the Magic Classrooms project in 2008 to address problems that had been identified. Research conducted by the Institute revealed a pattern of underachievement in poor rural and urban schools.
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Learner Leadership
The main aim of the learner and teacher development programme is to foster greater enthusiasm for learning and a greater belief in the potential of each child and the ability of teachers to help them flourish.
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The NMI was formally launched in 2007. Mr. Nelson Mandela spoke to the public about his vision for the NMI in this video…
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It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.
Nelson Mandela, founding statement, 2007Thoughts on Education
The vast majority of South African children struggle with basic literacy and numeracy. Grade 3 assessment scores suggest that the South African education system is producing some of the lowest literacy and numeracy scores across the world.
Approximately 7% of all children who entered schooling in 1991 achieved matriculation results that would have allowed them to follow further tertiary training. Less than 1% of rural and urban working-class and poor learners was able to achieve this central social dream.
The few learners who do gain entrance to tertiary study largely struggle to read and write at an undergraduate level. After five years, 56% of students in three-year degrees had left without graduating.
This is the elephant in the room. The education system is not working for poor black children – the majority of children in our nation. The results are inequitable and painful.
A young child in Mqanduli absorbs the myths of apartheid’s architects. She watches her brothers and sisters fail in education and thinks, “Perhaps there is something wrong with us”.
The sense of failure across rural classrooms has translated into a war of frustration, between and within educators, learners, parents and policy makers.
People are starting to blame teachers, learners and parents of the rural poor.
We are not failing in education because we are collectively useless. We are failing because the current system of education is not creating the conditions to “win”. This knowledge is liberating.
One of the core “problems behind the problems” is a misunderstanding and underestimation of the relationship between cognitive development and our children’s linguistic abilities.
There are some things we can do immediately, at scale, to recreate the conditions of basic education. These things require resources and leadership.
There are other things that we do not yet know enough about. In these areas we require investment into long-term demonstration-based research, focused on curriculum and pedagogy as it relates to the specific cognitive, social and linguistic capabilities of poor and working-class children.
The work of the NMI provides us with a set of ideas and understandings about education that allows us to move beyond frustration to a careful, step-by-step reconstruction of the humanity, knowledge base, pedagogy, and structure that must be brought together to establish “solid ground” under our future system of education.
