The dream started in 1994.

One day while driving my car and listening to the radio – I remember hearing that our President at the time Nelson R. Mandela had said that primary education will be free.

I had two boys at school at the time and I knew what it was costing me every month. I remember thinking to myself, where will the government get the money from?

The mind is a powerful thing and everyday I found myself thinking about the funding of education for the school children of South Africa.

I came up with the idea of using casinos to fund the education and the health care for the elderly. But when I went to find out about the licensing of a casino in SA at the CR Swart SAPS head offices in Durban. I went through to the gambling department of the SAPS – where I met a dominantly afrikaans major, who told me in no uncertain terms that casinos would never be legal in SA. I am embarrassed to say that I allowed that one gentleman to crush my idea, only to find that there are quite a few states in America that use their casinos for the funding of the school education in their states.

The idea left my mind for many years. Then in late 2013 one morning while shaving before leaving for work. I realized that I had become bitter instead of better.

I started thinking about why I was so bitter and realized that it was the daily dose of bad news I was receiving every morning listening to the radio while driving to work. Being continuously bombarded by everything that was going wrong in the country was detrimental to my health. I also realized that I was blaming the government for everything.

I had to ask myself, what I had done over the last 18 years to improve conditions in South Africa. My answer was nothing at all. I made two very important decisions that day, one never to listen to the news ever again and two – to start doing something to change the direction of our country.

The New Nation Education NPO was born in October of 2013. I looked at the most serious issues in our country like poverty and crime and asked, what can I do that will have the greatest impact.

I realized that the poverty and crime where very high because of the total lack of good quality education in our country. The statistics were there, poverty and crime increased every year, while the government reduced the pass percentage rate at schools every year. Another realization that struck me was that we only had to work on the education and a reduction in poverty and crime would be a knock on effect of good quality education.

We visited more that forty different schools in Soweto, West-rand and Randburg to gather information on what their biggest problems were. The cause for not delivering the education required. It became very clear that most of these schools did not have the funding required to create a safe environment. Where children could feel safe and have fun while learning. Most of the schools in South Africa have no security, no libraries, no computer classrooms, no sports equipment, no music instruments and not arts and culture class.

We had to come up with the funding to provide all the above if we are to give the children any form of a quality education.

You know the problem with most entrepreneurs is that they believe they can do everything themselves. By April 2019 I had run out of my own money.

I decided that the education of the children in South Africa was everyone’s problem so I changed the company into a Non-Profit. Since then I have been working on sourcing funds to carry out our pilot project in order to generate proof of concept.

Well then as we all know COVID happened. So, we are still sourcing funding for our pilot project and would love your help.

Our objectives are to generate sustainable funding for the more than 14 million school children in South Africa. While we help the more than 7.5 million unemployed people, the more than 26 million on social grants, the more than 4.5 million disabled people, the more that 2 million students that are unable to pay their tuition fees, the more than 2 million school drop-outs that will never land a job and the millions of people stuck in low income jobs. By proving business, entrepreneurship training workshops and skills development programs which will help them shift into the technology age.