We are honoured to introduce one of our new trustees, Rethabile Mashale.
Rethabile is the Director of Thope Foundation, a nonprofit organisation providing primary school support programmes to young girls in Khayelitsha.
She holds a Masters in Social Policy and Management from UCT and is a current PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University. Rethabile is also the current chairperson of Wordworks, an early literacy and numeracy organisation.
Rethabile came into contact with FunDza when she was our grant manager whilst working at The Learning Trust from 2012 to 2014. She was fascinated by FunDza’s combined literacy work and technology to expand our reach, which no other grantees were doing at the time.
“When I was invited onto the FunDza board, it was a dream come true. This was my chance to be part of this really amazing organisation creating and using platforms accessible to youth; youth who otherwise would not have access to the sophisticated and costly devices that would enable them to access the kind of content that Fundza provides.”
Before leaving the The Learning Trust, Rethabile started a literacy and robotics organisation because she was interested in early literacy and technology. Thus, FunDza became a logical collaborative partner in her new venture.
Rethabile’s fascination with social policy and its impact on the functioning and efficacy of nonprofit organizations led her to pursue a PhD in 2014. Her research looks at the South African non-profit governance, trying to understand how Non-Profits are responding to the threats in the change of policy, specifically looking at the revisions in the Non-Profit Act that the minister is proposing in efforts to regulate the NPO sector.
Thope Foundation and Rethabile’s work is focused on intervening at the tenuous points that impact young girls’ matriculation from school which therefore impacts the opportunities they are able to access in later life. Thus, a large focus of the work is on empowering girls and providing them with experiential learning opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and leadership.
“We want kids to finish school. The challenges for girls finishing school lies primarily with public health issues and personal safety.”
Rethabile’s background includes ten years of working in Public Health focusing on youth, sexual reproductive health education and behavior change strategies for youth. Lessons from her work in several Southern African countries where sexual reproductive health education meant delivering HIV prevention and treatment in abstract biomedical terms that did not resonate with learners. Over and over again, it required going back to the basics of natural science and basic literacy. But mostly it goes back to basics. Literacy.
Literacy is something that Rethabile has always been passionate about.
“I had the curse or the fortune of having parents that were forced into exile. My mom trained as a Waldorf teacher in Germany. When she came back she had the Waldorf community as a network and started Khayelitsha’s first Waldorf ECD centre.”
When she started school, there was no question of which school she would attend. Waldorf was the only option. Hence Rethabile was in Waldorf from kindergarten to class 13.
“It was always an anomaly because I was like 4 or 5 years old and commuting to white suburbs and then back to the townships. Waldorf was one of a few non-racial schools schools in South Africa in the late 1980s and 90s. So, it was like: What is this?”
She lived in Khayelitsha and commuted every day in casual clothes while her friends went to school in Khayelitsha wearing uniform. It was a challenge to bridge the different academic cultures. Rethabile wanted to teach her friends who didn’t have the access that she had to books and English as a medium of instruction. She would loan out 4 or 5 books from the school library to share with her friends starting a sort of informal book club. Some of the titles included the Sweet Valley High books.
“Discovering FunDza’s Harmony High series over 15 years later was like doing a 360!”
She brings with her a rich background working in youth development, funding, education, organisational development and capacity building to support the board of FunDza.