School Leadership Development
The School Leadership Programme is an initiative designed to improve the quality of education by capacitating school principals from under-resourced schools and enhancing their leadership skills through partnerships with business leaders.
The School Leadership Programme is an initiative designed to improve the quality of education by capacitating school principals from under-resourced schools and enhancing their leadership skills through partnerships with business leaders.
The schools selected for this programme are Quintiles 1, 2 and 3 schools, which are non-fee-paying schools in impoverished areas across Limpopo, North West and KwaZulu-Natal. Principals are partnered with business leaders and go through a leadership development programme that seeks to equip them with necessary management and leadership skills to effectively deal with the obstacles and challenges they face in their unique and individual circumstances focusing on adaptivity.
Additionally, the programme empowers principals and business partners in transitioning their leadership styles to be more inclusive, participatory and collaborative in a manner that breaks down barriers, fosters connections among staff and external stakeholders and inspires change.
The programme takes the form of the DBSA sponsoring partnerships between school principals and DBSA employees who volunteer to participate through the Bank’s CSI Staff Volunteer initiative. What is noteworthy is that the CSI programme also provided financial support to teachers in the programme who are normally supported through the fundraising activities of School Governing Bodies (SGBs) but could not be supported in this manner due to a halt in all activities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- DBSA sponsoring partnerships between school principals
- DBSA employees who volunteer to participate through the Bank’s CSI Staff Volunteer initiative
This project seeks to achieve proof of concept prior to scaling up to illustrate commercial viability of the pay-as-you-go model and to catalyse commercial financing. Main accomplishments to date include:
- Launching operations in Bumba and Kenge (north-east of Kinshasa) in July 2020
- Successfully ramping up its customer base from 0 to over 1 200 households in less than six months in 2020. On its way to reaching more than 3 000 subscribing households by September 2021
- A project information memorandum has been completed and is being presented to potential shareholders
- Increasing physical presence in four hubs by the end of 2021
- Approximately USD5 million financing to be invested through convertible instruments to scale up to 12 000 units by the end of 2021
invested in the school leadership programme