Busisiwe Mkhumbuzi

Busisiwe is building a movement of capable and skilled young people by equipping disenfranchised South African youth with the 21st century competencies they need to participate and thrive in the 4th industrial revolution labour markets.

Busisiwe is transforming the education sector by developing and evaluating 21st century competencies in children from underprivileged township schools to improve educational outcomes and prepare them for the constantly evolving, technologically driven labour markets. Her organisation Tshimong, has created a platform that makes a deliberate and scientifically informed connection between a learner’s extra-curricular or school activities and the development of critical competencies, thereafter providing a tangible score for these competencies to be measured.The core of her new idea is the creation of a platform that aligns a wide range of extra-curricular activities with skills such as critical thinking, character, communication, collaboration, problem solving and creativity, making it clear how each activity contributes to their development. By assessing the child’s performance in their chosen activity, the platform provides a concrete score which is used to provide a measurable understanding of their strengths and weaknesses that can be used to prepare them for future employment and career success. The system generates a holistic performance report that offers learners a comprehensive overview of their competency development, supporting self awareness, targeted improvement, informed decision making, and valuable insights on how to transfer their developed opportunities to increase opportunity. By using an internationally recognised framework to measure these competencies, and providing tangible scores to document each learners progress and development, Busisiwe offers a standardised and scientifically driven approach that will move the buzz of 21st century competencies past conversation and ensure that children are actually equipped with these critical skills.

The current education system in South Africa is ill equipped to develop 21st century skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication and creativity in learners, and those who are from marginalised communities are at even greater risk of never acquiring these skills. Busisiwe’s approach addresses the gap between education and the world of work by assessing and developing the skills that employers in today’s global labour markets are increasingly demanding. She is expanding the scope of the current curriculum by recognising the value of practical experiences and extra curricular activities in building these competencies. She offers a unique and unified approach to measuring, developing and offering a tangible score of the relevant competencies a child needs to thrive in today’s changing labour markets. Her focus on children in underprivileged schools and communities, ensures that those who are marginalised have access to an opportunity to develop and practice their 21st century competencies. Thus far she has worked in 135 township schools.

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate and the current education system is not producing students that have the right competencies to thrive in the current environment. This results in young people that According to CHRO South Africa, lack the skills that are important to adapt to the evolving labour markets and the jobs of the future such as critical thinking, problem solving, active learning, evolving, emotional intelligence, judgment and decision making. According to Ken Coleman, an acclaimed career coach and expert in personal development, for the first time, the same skills required to thrive in life are the same required to succeed in a career. Countries whose education system do not reform to meet these changes and demands, will experience the effect of compounding inequality for the underprivileged and leaving the youth in a position where they are not prepared for the world of tomorrow.

For many young people in South Africa especially from disadvantaged backgrounds education has not delivered the social progression they had hoped for. In an unequal country such as South Africa this is also felt in the unequal access to opportunities and the level of poverty undermines the confidence of young people whose parents struggle to make ends meet and secure a steady income due to the Bantu education system which subjected black people to inferior education and the establishment of townships, areas which were created to alienate Black people from access to resources, economic development and deny them opportunity to thrive. Post apartheid, South Africa’s education system and townships have not reformed, but have instead continued to be spaces that exacerbate inequality and unemployment.

These socioeconomic problems result in a dichotomous education system consisting of the private fee-paying schools and the state funded public schools. The private education sector is characterized by high tuition rates, quality education, a constantly evolving curriculum that keeps up to the demands of today’s global education standards as well as a holistic approach to the development of a child outside of classroom content. Many parents who have the privilege of affording private education value the development of critical 21st century competencies in their children and have access to arenas to develop these competencies in them. In contrast, the public education system, which caters to the majority of the population and those who are under-privileged, has remained frozen in time and failed to have reference to the impacts of the fast-changing demands of labour markets.

This has led to high youth unemployment rates and a youth that feels betrayed by the education system as it has prepared them for jobs that are no longer relevant or have been mechanised. According to BusinessTech South Africa, people between the ages of 15 - 24 remain the most vulnerable in the labour market, and those who have just finished school face the biggest challenges due to the lack of appropriate skills when they aim to enter the job market. Learners coming from under privileged communities are ill-equipped for the realities of the modern world. This not only limits their opportunities for employment, higher education, and social mobility but also perpetuates cycles of poverty and deepens existing inequalities. According to the National Education Collaboration Trust, 80,5% of learners from non-fee-paying schools are perceived to leave school without the necessary 21st century competencies and tools to succeed in the modern and changing world, in contrast to only 26,3% of learners in fee paying schools who face the same adversity.

According to Thomas Piketty, a political economist, education has the potential to be an equalizer to existing inequality, however, such education must be of good quality. Despite the recognition in the public education sector that youth need to develop these critical competencies to survive and thrive in today’s world and that this change must occur through curriculum reform, key players have not achieved significant progress in this matter that would translate into a unified approach on how to develop these competencies and accurately measure them to assess each child’s position in relation to them.

Busisiwe offers a 12-week programme to learners in township and rural schools that gives them a platform to link the extra-curricular activities they are engaged in at school, to relevant 21st century competencies. The platform objectively assesses their performance in their passion areas and converts the feedback into tangible scores and reports that they can use to gain awareness on the competencies they possess, their strengths and weaknesses, and on which areas they need to improve to make these skills relevant and transferrable to other important areas of their lives.

When Tshimong was still a debating club, Busisiwe knew that there were certain skills possessed by children who participated in debating that set them apart from those who did not and gave them an advantage in academics and career prospects. While the difference that debating made was clear, there was no evidence on the types of skills that were produced and enhanced by these activities. This triggered her to drive to provide scientific evidence of how any activity where a student drives their learning has the potential to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.

By using debating as a simulation, Busisiwe began observing and assessing the skills that her debaters were developing as they participated in the programme. She came to discover that these skills they were developing were necessary for any young person to thrive in today’s world and were being increasingly demanded globally. She developed a scoring method which would give accurate feedback on each child’s positionality in relation to each competency. She discovered that the skills she was fostering through debating were in fact the 21st century competencies. She approached eCubed, a government entity that had been mandated to move children from rote learning to active learning, with the aim of developing 21st century competencies, to show them that she had not only discovered a method of cultivating these skills in children, but that for the first time there was a way of accurately measuring them and providing a tangible score. Being sold on her idea, they requested her to bring on board the University of Johannesburg and Centre for Curriculum Reform (CCR) who had been doing research on how to prepare students to adapt to 21st century needs and had developed a competencies framework that set out fourteen competencies that students have the opportunity to achieve in any co-curricular experience. The framework had only gone as far as recognising the skills 21st century competencies that the youth needed to be capacitated with, but had not discovered how it would be done or how to measure this. Busisiwe brought to them a method of developing these skills, measuring them, and a method of giving a tangible score for each competency to assess their development, which no organisation is currently doing. Tshimong is the first organisation to provide a method to measure the critical 21st century skills that need to be developed in youth. The competencies that CCR had identified in their framework were those she had already been observing in the debaters and she incorporated the framework into her scoring method to be able to align each child with the specific 21st century competencies they needed to build and to give a “name” to the skills she had already been observing and developing in the children.

She recognised that the education sector does not address or develop these skills in children, nor are children provided with an opportunity to practice them. She saw that there was a need for children to have this platform as part of their school curriculum, and as such Busisiwe approached the National Education Collaboration Trust (an organisation working with government to transform the basic education sector) and eCubed, to launch a pilot programme for grade 9 pupils which was discontinued, due to the organisations being refocused by the government post COVID.

While there have been delays from the Ministry of Education to incorporate her programme into active learning in the classroom, Busisiwe has not been deterred but this led her to pivot and broaden her scope. This has allowed her to develop an online platform that mapped all the core competencies that a child will be exposed to through participating in extra-curricular activities and a coach or teacher can provide feedback on how they are performing. For example, if a child plays soccer, then they are exposed to critical thinking as they must pass the ball in a very strategic and creative manner under pressure. This can improve their critical thinking and they can get a score to assess these critical competencies. She developed a platform that would be able to assess a child’s performance in any extra-curricular or passion area and linked it to relevant 21st century competencies.

The first step involves a learner creating a profile on the platform and inputting the extra-curricular activity they partake in. The person responsible for the activity (such as a teacher or sports coach) thereafter creates a profile on the platform as well where they will map and give feedback on the learner’s performance in the activity, subject to the questions on the platform. The questions have been designed to assess the relevant core competencies that are present in each extra-curricular activity, such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, character, problem solving and creativity. The learner and teacher are then provided with a numerical score, that converts the feedback into a concrete and tangible score to assess their position in relation to 21st century competencies.

This initiative raises awareness about the relevant competencies that each child needs in order to thrive in the face of an ever changing labour market, and the children are given an arena to demonstrate these competencies and have an opportunity to improve and build on them The feedback allows not only the learner, but also the teacher and parent to assess at what level their child currently is pertaining each competency, where they need to improve and how they can transfer these skills.

To date she has reached 135 township schools across South Africa’s nine provinces and developed a database of 1400 learners through her programme, allowing them to see the impact of the programme, from its beginning to its end. Busisiwe has been able to provide a tangible score to 21st century competencies which has never been achieved before. She has worked with Afrika Tikkun, an organisation that is focused on creating an economically thriving South Africa by investing in the youth and giving them an opportunity to realise their potential, to implement the programme with 18 – 21-year-olds. She has also worked with Nova and Spark schools in the private sector.

Busisiwe has moved the discussions about 21st century competencies beyond just conversation and provided empirical evidence showing the benefits of acquiring these skills. She has developed a framework to measure them and a way to incorporate them into the education system, beyond the curriculum.

Busisiwe grew up in Soweto, a township famous for its contribution to the antiapartheid struggle and often described as the heartbeat of activism. She had the opportunity to attend schools in Lenasia and Parktown, which took her beyond the borders of township life, but also exposed her to the stark contrasts between her two lives. From a young age, she was aware of the striking disparities in the access to resources and living conditions between herself and her peers from her neighbourhood, which fostered a strong sense of social consciousnesses in her and unwavering commitment to fighting for equality and justice. She had a deep connection to the challenges and aspirations of her community due to the upbringing she had. She sought to bridge the gap between privilege and opportunity and nurture the potential within the children in her community using her knowledge and skills as powerful tools of empowerment.

Her biggest influence from an early age was her father, who was part of the 1976 Soweto uprising and a student activist. He built her mind with rich stories from his times as a political activist, as well as poetry and music and she would impart such knowledge to her peers through the directing and writing of plays that were performed in a community church. She would fundraise and ask for donations for the play, which was hosted as a commemoration of June 16 (the remembrance of student activists who died fighting for their rights), and the collected money was used to buy stationery and uniforms for her peers who did not have the means to afford it.

One of the biggest turning points in her life was at the age of 16 while auditioning for Eve Ensler’s renowned play, “I am an emotional creature: The secret life of girls around the world”. Although she did not make the role she was auditioning for, Eve Ensler saw a leader in her and invited her to facilitate conversations with her peers during these plays across various schools. With the support of Eve and Pat Mitchell, she would later found the first African chapter of VGirls, an organisation which sought to unite young girls on the problems that they face and form an organised movement to address and solve these challenges. Some of the highlights of this chapter were demonstrations held against rape and sexual harassment where they went out into the city to challenge the victimization of women and young girls. It is during this period that through the power of storytelling and performance, she discovered a potent vehicle for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, shedding light on their struggles and inspiring others to join the fight for equality and justice.

Busisiwe took these lessons from childhood with her when pursuing her studies at the University of Cape Town and formed hubs in rural areas to replicate the VGirls movement. She also became actively involved in the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, which were a call for the decolonization of education in institutions of higher learning and the fight for free quality education for all. She was charged and found guilty of defamation for voicing out racism and was subsequently suspended for a period of 12 months from UCT. She experienced firsthand the victimization that comes with speaking out and the unsustainability of protest as a means of public engagement. These experiences were her inspiration to establish Tshimong and bring others on board. What started as a debating organisation, through her initiative and pivoting, became an organisation focused on developing 21st century competencies in South African youth. She has had the honour of speaking at TedWomen, TEDxUCT and hosting the Barrack Obama Lecture in 2018.

In 2016 while in Washington, D.C. on a South African Washington International Program (SAWIP) fellowship opportunity, she would visit the Ashoka offices as often as she could because she resonated with Bill Drayton’s vision of a changing world and how everyone could be a change maker. Busisiwe wants to join the fellowship to gain a place where she is seen and heard by an ecosystem that values her as a social entrepreneur.