Education is often described as a lever for systemic change that can provide a pathway from poverty to opportunity and prosperity. Yet despite pockets of excellence, grand-scale systemic change remains a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Philanthropy's role in moving from education access to social justice

Philanthropy has long played a significant role in South African education, aiming to improve access to quality education for all - supporting schools, bursaries, teacher development, early childhood initiatives and innovation pilots. These contributions matter not only because they change lives and demonstrate what is possible, but can also introduce proven innovations that can be scaled.

Pouring effort into trying to fix the many problems in the education system brings improvements that relieve the pressure, but it does not delve into the uncomfortable territory of why these problems exist in the first place.

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Like it or not, education is a social justice issue - that is, a matter of who gets access to opportunity and who is systematically denied it. Therefore, to make a real and lasting impact in the education sector, philanthropy must ask harder questions about how and why it funds, and whose power its funding ultimately reinforces.

Too often, education funding prioritises short-term outputs over long-term transformation; innovation over system-building; and isolated success stories over collective impact. In some cases, philanthropic funding mirrors the very inequalities it seeks to address - fragmented, concentrated and disconnected from those...