Makhanda: the literacy outlier

By Simphiwe Xaka and Rod Amner

The numbers tell Makhanda’s contradictory story. 

On the one hand, the Auditor General rates Makana Municipality’s performance in the bottom 2.8% of municipalities in the country. 

On the other hand, while most children here face poverty rates typical of the Eastern Cape, in its public schools, 41% of Grade 4 learners can read for meaning. Nationally, only 19% can do the same. 

The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) surveyed 12,000 South African Grade 4s and found that 81% cannot retrieve basic information from a text, interpret simple story events, or explain what they've read. 

Makhanda is the only South African city with comprehensive data tracking every Grade 4 student's reading ability, and those numbers reveal something impossible: a small, crisis-ridden town is achieving literacy rates more than double the national average. 

But this success masks South Africa's deepest education challenge. Because the very conditions that made Makhanda's progress possible may be impossible to replicate at scale without a massive shift in the way basic education is run.

The data that breaks the rules 

For the last three years, education researchers from GADRA Education and Rhodes University have tested every Grade 4 learner in Makhanda's schools - over 1,000 children each year. The local reading for meaning rate sits at more than twice the national average.

But, even within Makhanda's relative success, inequality persists. Of learners in English-medium schools, 51% can read for meaning in 2025. But among isiXhosa-medium students, only 24% reach the benchmark.

This pattern reflects a national reality: in African-language schools, only about 13% of learners can read for meaning. The language of instruction matters profoundly, raising questions about mother-tongue education that South Africa has barely begun to address.

The making of an outlier

What makes Makhanda different? The answer does not lie in government intervention.

Walk into Makhanda’s four no-fee English-medium schools participating in GADRA Education's QondaRead program and you'll find something remarkable: structured phonics instruction, and graded readers carefully matched to learners' levels. By November 2024, Grade 1 learners were identifying 33-36 letter sounds per minute - approaching or exceeding the national benchmark of 40. Grade 2 students were reading 30+ words correctly per minute. Grade 3 learners were reading at 50 words per minute with comprehension.

These are not elite schools. They're quintile 3 no-fee schools where fewer than 5% of learners speak English at home. Most children arrive speaking isiXhosa or Afrikaans. Yet QondaRead, developed through six years of practice-based research through Gadra’s Whistle Stop School, has produced effect sizes substantially larger than most literacy interventions achieve.

Or visit the more than 40 Foundation Phase classrooms across the city that now have classroom book libraries, provided through partnerships with the Lebone Centre, the Rhodes University Library and other NGOs. These aren't token gestures – they are high-quality collections that enable daily reading instruction and allow children to take books home, creating literacy environments that extend beyond school walls. Sadly, there are over 160 Foundation classrooms in the city, meaning 75% still don’t have libraries. 

Or attend a meeting of the Makhanda Circle of Unity Education Cluster, where principals from the district's public and private schools, activists from local NGOs and Rhodes academics gather to share strategies, support each other, and coordinate improvement efforts. The cluster has become a powerful vehicle for horizontal accountability, with education leaders holding each other to standards the system fails to enforce.

Or examine the work of the Makhanda Literacy Forum, which also brings together NGOs, schools, and university experts to coordinate ideas and literacy interventions across the early childhood to Grade 4 spectrum. 

Or the Rhodes University Certificate Course on School Leadership offered to local principals and deputies, or the Certificate in Foundation Phase Literacy Teaching offered by the Rhodes Centre for Social Development to local teachers. 

Or the hundreds of Rhodes students involved every year in early childhood development programs, reading clubs and tutoring and mentoring programs. 

What unites all these initiatives is their origin. In 2014, Makana was the fifth-worst-performing educational district in the Eastern Cape. A year later, Prof Sizwe Mabizela was inaugurated as Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University. He declared that Rhodes would not only be in Makhanda but of Makhanda. “A university must serve the community in which it exists,” he said, “and education is where that service begins.”

Mabizela assembled a task team of experts, community leaders, and professionals to launch the Initiative to Revitalise Public Schooling. 

Ten years later, substantial progress has been made at every level: from literacy levels, retention rates, Bachelor's passes and graduation of local students at Rhodes. On these metrics, Makana is now the best-performing district in the province. 

About 400 representatives attended the Makhanda Education Summit in 2024, which adopted the vision that the city will emerge as the leading education city in South Africa by 2028. Significantly, they were joined by representatives of the Eastern Cape Department of Education. 

While Makhanda’s educational transformation emerged largely from outside the Department of Education (DOE), there are hopeful signs that civil society has cultivated some key allies in the local DOE, helping to drive transformation in public education. 

The Sobral question

This matters because civil society, for all its innovation and dedication, cannot solve South Africa's literacy crisis alone. The scale is too vast, the resources required too substantial, and the coordination challenges too complex.

The interventions that work in a small city with a university partner, active NGOs, and mobilised parents cannot simply be dropped into rural villages or sprawling townships where those resources don't exist.

This is the insight that Sobral, Brazil, offers - and the one that makes the Western Cape's approach instructive. Sobral, a poor city in northeastern Brazil, transformed itself from one of the country's worst-performing education municipalities to its best-performing through sustained, systematic, government-led reform. Starting in 1997, a series of mayors made literacy by age eight a non-negotiable goal. They fired unqualified teachers (and hired some back if they retrained), instituted merit-based hiring for principals, created rigorous assessment systems with accountability, and invested heavily in teacher training and resources.

Critically, Sobral's transformation required political will, stable leadership, and what one analysis calls "clear, enforceable frameworks" that created alignment from city hall to classroom. Civil society participated, but the state was at the centre.

The Western Cape Education Department, while far from perfect, has built a similar model of state-led reform that incorporates civil society expertise. Funda Wande, an NGO with a powerful track record, now partners with the Western Cape Department of Education to roll out literacy programs at scale. A Department official and Funda Wande representative recently visited Sobral together to study its methods.

Funda Wande and the Western Cape Education Department can work together precisely because the Western Cape has relatively stable education leadership, functional bureaucratic systems, and a culture of using evidence to inform practice

The impossible question

However, the jury is out on whether the Eastern Cape offers these conditions.

Which brings us to a question this series will explore in the coming weeks: How do you scale innovation when the state is both essential and dysfunctional?

Since 2020, the Eastern Cape Department of Education has systematically underfunded the province's no-fee schools, retaining massive amounts meant for direct school funding for what it calls “centralised procurement”. In 2024 alone, the department held back R853 million that should have gone directly to schools. Over five years, the underfunding amounts to around R5 billion.

A Makhanda High Court case, ongoing since October 2023, challenges this practice. The Legal Resources Centre is representing the Makhanda Circle of Unity and several Makhanda school governing bodies, arguing that the department is violating the National Norms and Standards for School Funding. A school with 1,000 learners should have received R1.74 million in 2024, but received just R1.06 million, a shortfall that cripples basic operations.

But the funding crisis is only the surface problem. Deeper down lies something more corrosive: many Makhanda principals feel unsupported, some even traumatised, by their interactions with the hierarchies of the Eastern Cape Department of Education. It is therefore not surprising that the Department of Education has never been invited to participate in the Makhanda Circle of Unity Education Cluster.

Apartheid legacies, including the merger of fragmented Bantustan systems (Transkei and Ciskei), entrenched patronage networks, factionalism, and nepotism - often involving unions like SADTU that prioritise member interests over reform. Leadership instability, capacity gaps, political interference, and poor management lead to infrastructure delays and inequitable resource allocation.

The result is a perverse dynamic: schools achieving remarkable results often do so by working around the body meant to support them. Makhanda proves dramatic literacy gains are possible in under-resourced contexts through teacher support, materials, family programs, and collaboration. The data is unambiguous. 

But it also highlights an uncomfortable truth: these flourished largely independently of a provincial department marked by authoritarianism, dysfunction, and funding diversion.

In the Western Cape, state and civil society build partnerships via strong vertical accountability - from province to schools. In the Eastern Cape, with its weak vertical structures, horizontal accountability among non-state actors fills the void in places like Makhanda. 

The R50-million Funda Uphumelele National Survey Project and the Minister of Basic Education's new National Education and Training Council signal growing political will to confront the literacy crisis. But political will means little if it cannot bridge the chasm between the state agencies that must drive change at scale and the civil society organisations that know how to produce results on the ground.

Over the coming weeks, this series of M&G feature articles will unpack key aspects of South Africa's literacy crisis: why language matters, how teacher support transforms classrooms, what families can contribute when given the tools, and whether political will can overcome decades of institutional dysfunction.

We'll hear from the 350 Rhodes University students who shared their own literacy journeys -stories of shame and triumph, of grandmothers who taught them to read and teachers who gave up on them. We'll examine some of the reasons why learners in African-language classrooms lag so far behind and what it might take to close that gap. We'll explore the specific interventions - from classroom libraries and better public libraries to teacher training programs - that the data shows actually work.

But we'll also grapple with the harder question: whether South Africa can scale solutions when success requires government to partner with the very civil society actors it has often failed, frustrated, or simply ignored.

Can the state become what it must be: not an obstacle to overcome, but a partner in transformation?

A rural classroom in South Africa showing limited learning materials", image-prompt "A rural classroom in South Africa with old books and simple desks, natural lighting, educational setting

Strategies to Improve Literacy Rates

Addressing low literacy requires a multi-faceted approach:

• Mother Tongue Education: Teaching children in their home language during early grades helps build a strong foundation before transitioning to other languages.

  
  

• Teacher Training: Investing in teacher development ensures educators have the skills to teach reading effectively.

  
  

• Access to Books: Providing libraries, reading corners, and affordable books encourages reading outside the classroom.

  
  

• Early Childhood Programs: Expanding quality early learning centers prepares children for school literacy demands.

  
  

• Community Involvement: Parents and community members can support literacy by reading with children and promoting education.

  
  
  
  

The Role of Technology and Innovation

Technology offers new ways to support literacy development. Mobile apps, interactive e-books, and online learning platforms can provide engaging reading materials tailored to different languages and skill levels. For example, some South African initiatives use tablets loaded with local stories to encourage reading in rural schools.

However, technology alone cannot solve the problem. It must be combined with strong teaching and community support to be effective.

The Economic and Social Benefits of Improving Literacy

Improving literacy among youth has wide-reaching benefits:

• Higher Employment Rates: Literate youth have better job prospects and can contribute more effectively to the economy.

  
  

• Reduced Poverty: Education breaks the cycle of poverty by opening doors to better income and opportunities.

  
  

• Healthier Communities: Literate individuals make informed health choices, leading to improved public health.

  
  

• Stronger Democracy: Literacy empowers youth to participate in civic life and hold leaders accountable.

  
  
  
  

What Can Individuals Do to Help?

Everyone can play a part in improving literacy:

• Volunteer to read with children or support local schools.

  
  

• Donate books or learning materials to under-resourced communities.

  
  

• Advocate for policies that prioritize education funding and teacher training.

  
  

• Encourage youth to develop reading habits by sharing stories and creating reading groups.

  
  
  
  

The challenge of low literacy among South African youth is complex but not insurmountable. With coordinated efforts from government, communities, educators, and individuals, more young people can gain the skills they need to succeed.

Improving literacy is not just about reading and writing. It is about unlocking potential, creating opportunities, and building a stronger future for South Africa’s youth.