BigThink

One of the two goals of the Mundzuku Scholarship Project was to create a sustainable peer-to-peer mentoring structure at the local high school led by our youth partner Tumelo. The structure, as developed by Tumelo, is that a core group of students is formed and comes together to gather information and learn everything they can about the university application process, the bursary (scholarships) application process, and how to write quality applications. The idea is that then this core group of students will actually do workshops with their classmates in the various grades.
This was the goal and the structure that we developed in coordination with Tumelo in the last 9 months prior to arriving in South Africa. But if you’ve ever done development work you know that you can prepare for years but until you get on the ground and do your reassessments with your local partners you never know how the project is going to go. We had no way of knowing if Tumelo would find enough interest to form that core group of students.
Fortunately, Tumelo is an amazingly motivated individual and by the time we had our first meeting with him he brought along two other students, Ethel and Samson, who he wanted to form the leadership of the peer-mentoring structure. In this meeting all three students were passionate about helping their fellow students and themselves achieve some type of higher education. With the leadership formed, the project has an amazing start and our full peer-mentoring structure is starting to take form.

- David Lamb and Julie Walz