Dr Jagarnath, please share your career trajectory to date.
I started out as an academic and became deputy dean at Rhodes University. But as education in the country began shifting, I wanted to contribute more directly. That led me to the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), where I’ve spent the past decade working on education across Africa. My focus has been on worker education in multiple languages; French, Portuguese, Swahili, Arabic as well as adult education programmes here at home. Up to that point, much of my work had been theoretical or centred on working-class families. As a mother aware of the demands education places on families, especially working-class ones, I realised change is needed.
South Africans have great talent, and by working together we can accomplish more than we believe is possible. Tired of being a bystander, I chose to act. I adapted the quality education and support my child received at a private school into an accessible option for working-class families.
Brandon, can you please tell us about your current projects?
I’ve worked across both the education and insurance sectors, and over time became focused on how products are built. Instead of starting with spreadsheets, profit models and product structures, I begin with what the real market needs – especially where people are being taken advantage of. In South Africa, this is particularly evident in insurance and education.
Much of my recent work has been in micro-loans and insurance, where we’re trying to improve access to capital and ultimately make it more affordable. That initiative is gaining strong traction.
The third area is education. South Africa has a significant educational divide. What Dr Jagarnath has pioneered is a model that delivers high-quality education that is genuinely accessible for the working class. Our broader goal is to promote education in South Africa in a simple, scalable way that reaches the mass market. Our approach is straightforward: find the real market need, understand it holistically and build solutions that genuinely help people.
Dr Jagarnath, please tell us about ImfundoHub.
We’re not an ed-tech company – we’re an education company that uses technology. Many ed-tech solutions are built around the tech, not around how children learn. They miss the deep educational needs, and they don’t meet learners where they are.
Too often, we design for upper-income families and then water it down for poorer communities. We’re doing the opposite: starting with real educational needs and building upwards from there.
Learners receive their CAPS-aligned weekly syllabus, notes, exam questions, practice answers and memos directly on their phones. Mondays are for the syllabus, Tuesdays for free library books and Wednesdays for a general knowledge insight – anything from “What is a national budget?” to “What is feminism?” or “The history of rugby in South Africa.”
We’ve also added financial literacy from grade one to matric, starting with simple concepts like needs vs wants and building up through the grades with activities.
Every Friday, learners get a 20-question quiz covering the full CAPS curriculum. This helps us track progress and provide parents with a monthly report. We’ve introduced an AI learning tutor that supports English, Afrikaans, Sotho, Xhosa and Zulu.
Brandon Garbutt [BG]: Most South Africans can only be reached where they already are – on WhatsApp. Only about 13-million households have WiFi, and many don’t have the devices or data for complex apps. A single 16-minute video can cost R200 in data – money many households need for food. But a R29 WhatsApp bundle gives you a million messages. Schools may have WiFi, but at home learners need something cheap and reliable.
We’re not trying to be the next big fintech. We’re solving real problems: cost, access and meaningful educational content. For R30 a month, just 0.58% of the minimum wage – families support their children’s learning every day affordably.
Dr Jagarnath, please discuss the education crisis in South Africa, including its underlying causes.
The biggest problem is access. Half of South African learners don’t have access to textbooks, and that’s one of the biggest failures in our system. South Africa’s foundation phase literacy is in crisis. By Grade 4, less than 20% of learners can read and write at the required level, while Kenya and Zimbabwe sit above 80%.
The government provides the CAPS curriculum, but teachers must prepare lessons and in many schools they don’t. We’ve done the preparation for them. We’ve mapped the entire CAPS curriculum week by week and packaged it as a guided step-by-step for teachers and learners.
The state continually emphasises mother-tongue learning. But for mother-tongue learning, we only have textbooks until grade three. It was important for us to be able to get kids that are learning in their mother tongue material to support them.
What frustrates me is hearing officials talk about technology as if that will fix education. It won’t. Half of our learners don’t even have textbooks, and of the rest, many must share. Only about a quarter of South African children can take a textbook home. A textbook adds up to six to18 months of learning in a single year.
Public libraries are closing and 74% of schools have no libraries. We complain that children don’t read, but we don’t give them anything to read. Around 64% of homes have no reading material at all. And the result is devastating: 50% children drop out before matric. Of those who remain, the pass mark is 33.3%, and only 25% take pure maths. Without pure maths, we cannot advance as a society.
Look at the comparison: India produces 1.5-million engineers a year; we produce 15 000. In 1991, our GDPs were in the same range. Today, India has surged ahead while we’ve stagnated. This is what an education crisis looks like.
Dr Jagarnath, you have stated that education is the basis of how we build a society. Please expand on this.
Education is everything. My own family is proof of that. My grandmother was illiterate; she spoke only Hindi and Zulu and learned to read late in life. Yet in one generation, her eight granddaughters all earned postgraduate degrees. That’s how dramatically education can change a family.
For many South Africans, especially black South Africans, access to education opened doors that were previously shut. But education shouldn’t depend on luck or timing. It is a right, it reshapes a society – economically, socially and intellectually. Look at India’s growth; it shows what happens when a country invests in education at scale.
When children learn, they develop imagination, curiosity and the ability to question the world around them. That’s essential in an age of AI, fake news and misinformation. Too many young people don’t know how to read a book in the deeper sense – they don’t understand titles, tables of contents or how to navigate knowledge. Without that, critical thinking collapses. CAPS is a strong syllabus, but access is the real barrier.
We’re trying to fix that. We’re providing the actual texts, the substance and the tools that help build informed, thoughtful citizens, people who can contribute to South Africa’s future.
And yes, financial literacy is part of that. There’s a massive gap in financial planning education, and ImfundoHub is already working on programmes to close it.
Brandon Garbutt: Education policies promise that if a parent dies, the child can study at Harvard or Oxford. But only 0.01% of matriculants ever study overseas, and that’s not linked to bereavement. Your child still must get accepted. People pay premiums for benefits they’ll never see, and the value only appears after death.
We have taken a different approach. We have built ImfundoHub into funeral cover so that your monthly premium includes educational support for your child. That’s how you start blending education and insurance in a way that matters now, not only when someone dies. And this thinking applies to financial planning too. We need to shift the mindset: invest in your child’s education today, not in the fantasy of Harvard someday. Our weekly insights – on budgets, currency, exchange rates – help families build real financial understanding.
For years, the industry has competed over the same 1.6-million affluent clients, trading them back and forth. But the real growth engine sits outside that bubble. If we invest in the broader population, that 1.6-million becomes the foundation for exponential expansion.
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