Dr. Rethabile Sonibare
Making A Difference

I've been given an awesome chance, an amazing chance to be able to go to school and have all of these resources and opportunites afforded to me. What responsibility do I have to my community? What do I do? How do I give back in a way that makes sense and doesn't take away from who I am as a person? That's how I got into the work with Thope Foundation and how I got into the work with Molo Mhlaba.

I worked for a grant-making organization that was giving grants to after-school programs and, being a grad manager to a big grant portfolio, one of the lessons I learned in that role was that you can't plug a gun with a plaster. An afterschool programme is great because it extends learning for children. It keeps them safe after school, it affords them experiences that normal school doesn't give them.

We were looking at where our value add is, and we've always worked in primary schools and we've always worked with girls so it made sense to continue running a primary school. Because if you lay the foundation really well for children, if you start with them in the first 3000 days of life, you can really change the trajectory of their educational outcomes. So that's what we decided was going to be more meaningful, and now we run a school.

Our girls were out of school for five months and we ran a homeschooling programme, but then they came back in July and one of the girls, she was in grade two last year and she's in grade three this year. She says they went to Crazy Plastics and there was a clearance table and she was nagging her mom to buy her this solar system. We run astronomy classes at the school, and there was a box set to make your own solar system. So the mom eventually said, "It's like a R100, so I'm going to just buy it". So she bought it and the girl assembled it and she put this project together and she was teaching her parents about the solar system. And the mom called us and asked, "What are you teaching these children? They know things I never learned in school!" And I thought, "Yeah, that's the world we live in now!" They're learning things at the age of eight that their parents didn't learn back in the day.

I guess I have my own big, hairy, audacious goal, which is to make sure that South African townships produce graduates and they produce people who come and change the landscape, not make the landscape of townships. One of the things I've become quite aware of is that townships are always going to exist. The question is, how do we make townships places that are safe, happy, economically viable and conducive environments? Because at the moment, they're not very conducive. How do we create a generation of young people who are inspired and want to make townships places that are also livable, workable spaces? Right? I want to play a part in that and I think education is going to be my weapon against generational poverty.

I think one of the biggest challenges that we face when working with girls, and I think it's also why we do what we do, is really around child safety and girls safety specifically. 

From my own experience, and it underpins why I got the PhD, it was really just to be able to have your name have authority and have your voice be recognized as being a thought leader in a particular space. When I was working, constantly having to put your hand up and then having your hand not recognized and the frustration that comes with it was like, "Well, I'm going to go get that PhD so they can like call me Dr - don't you dare call me Mrs!" So I guess that was one of the big things, but I think it goes back to my earlier point of, we need to have more women represented in different spaces in all aspects.

One of the things that I learned quite early on is that we actually needed a brand. First of all, we needed to be quite clear in our branding and our messaging of what we were doing, but we also needed to package ourselves as a product. So the work that we're doing, we need to conceive it as a product. And when you cost a product, you don't say, "Well, I'm selling hope" or "I'm selling love", or "I'm selling caring". It's not how you do it. So we needed to think of ourselves as a business and as a business, we're in the business of doing good. But in the business of doing good, we also need to think about sustainability, right?

I think it's trust. First of all, it's honesty. So don't oversell something that you can't deliver on. Be honest about your capability and your track record, don't overstate your ability because we live in a world with things that change constantly, and projects are changing constantly. So the donor needs to have confidence and they need to trust your story and they need to trust your track record. The thing, for me, that's really a big thing is operating from the premise of trust, honesty, and credibility.

I never make a cold pitch. I research all of our investors before I go and I guess I tailor a lot of the presentation and our pitch to individual donors, depending on what we are asking for. Sometimes, it's okay to have a generic pitch that you add bits and pieces to, but oftentimes we're asking for different things. Running a school means that there's a nutrition programme, there are uniform and stationary, as well as staff costs. So every element is fundraised differently and it comes from different sources and pots.