USADF grantee Stacey Brewer, a Mandela Washington Fellow under the U.S. government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), is a young entrepreneur reimagining South Africa's educational system through SPARK Schools: a network of private schools offering affordable, globally competitive education.
After learning about the discrepancy between education funding and academic achievement, she was inspired to prove South Africa can provide high-quality education at the same price that the government allocates. She co-founded SPARK Schools in 2012 and has worked to expand its reach since.
The first SPARK school opened in 2013 in Johannesburg, and since then, the network has expanded to serve more than 10,000 SPARK scholars at 21 schools that employ more than 1,000 people.
Initially, SPARK was only a kindergarten through 7th grade offering, but USADF’s grant funding of $25,000 awarded in 2015 allowed it to pilot high school-level education. SPARK’s goal is to have 46 schools by 2026 that support at least 20,000 children.
SPARK has had its share of challenges. In the beginning, it had to build credibility so it could attract capital, staff, parents, and scholars. As SPARK scaled, ensuring the SPARK culture prevailed across various schools was also a priority and required leadership to trust SPARK’s school leaders to be living and breathing examples of SPARK’s core values (service, persistence, achievement, responsibility, kindness, and unique value). “We don't want to scale for people to just become numbers, so how do we really ensure the service and delivery at every school are consistent with what we aim to do,” SPARK leadership asked itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic also brought challenges and opportunities. SPARK closed its schools in mid-March 2020. When schools re-opened, families could choose whether to send their children back to classrooms, so SPARK developed remote learning packs for families. “Not everyone is fortunate enough to have resources at home to access technologies, so ensuring accessibility has been important,” Brewer concluded.