Examining Edu Invest: Will it truly uplift South Africa's disadvantaged learners?

The launch of Edu Invest, a public–private partnership between Wesgro and the Western Cape Education Department has been presented as an innovative solution to growing pressure on the province’s schools. With nearly R400 million secured already, the initiative promises to expand educational opportunities.

Yet, the real question is not how much is raised, but where the money goes. The Western Cape’s education landscape is deeply unequal. Almost 95% of learners attend public schools, the majority of which are no-fee or low-fee institutions. These schools face chronic overcrowding, underfunding, and a lack of facilities. For too long, this has created what many call “gutter education”: learners being denied dignity, pride, and the resources they deserve.

If Edu Invest primarily directs funding to higher-fee, already affluent schools, it risks becoming a mechanism to balance the books of the privileged, expand that very system, and build more of those schools—rather than uplifting the poorest of the poor. Such an approach would entrench inequality instead of resolving it. The real need is clear: investment must be channeled into no-fee and low-fee schools, particularly in underserved and disadvantaged areas. This means more classrooms to ease overcrowding, better infrastructure, and access to facilities such as libraries, laboratories, technology centres, and sports fields. Learners in working-class and rural communities should feel pride in their schools, value in their resources, and the dignity of knowing their education is not second-class.

We know excellence is possible everywhere. COSAT in Khayelitsha, a no-fee school, achieved a 98% mathematics pass rate—proof that achievement is not limited by geography or income, but by opportunity. The challenge is not learner potential, but systemic inequality. Edu Invest can make a real difference if it closes these gaps, rather than widening them. Transformation will be measured by whether it eases overcrowding, restores dignity, and empowers every learner to thrive. An investment in education is indeed an investment in economic growth.

But growth will only be sustainable when it is built on an education system that does not divide, but unites; does not privilege, but uplifts; and does not reproduce inequality, but eradicates it.

Andre De Bruyn

Chairperson of the Education and Allied Workers Union of SA (EUSA) Western Cape.