How a broken city doubled South Africa's literacy rate

Civil society cannot solve the country’s literacy crisis on its own, because the scale is too vast

- Rod Amner and Simphiwe Xako

Makhanda embodies contradiction. The Auditor General of South Africa rates the performance of the governing municipality, Makana, in the bottom 2.8% of local governments.

Yet, amid poverty and dysfunction, 41% of its public school Grade 4 learners can read for meaning - more than double the national average of 19%.

The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study tested 12 000 South African Grade 4s and found that 81% couldn't retrieve basic information, interpret simple stories, or explain what they'd read. Makhanda tracks the reading ability of every Grade 4 student - over 1 000 yearly.

While the Eastern Cape town is in crisis, its reading scores are shattering educational norms.

However, this success masks a significant educational challenge. Because the very conditions that made Makhanda's progress possible may be impossible to replicate at scale without a massive shift in the way basic education is run.

For three years, NGO GADRA Education and Rhodes University have assessed all Grade 4 learners in Makhanda.

While 51% of learners in no-fee English-medium schools reached reading benchmarks, only 25% of isiXhosa and Afrikaans learners did.

It's structural, not innate. African languages are often taught through rote syllables without comprehension. isiXhosa storybooks are scarce, and teacher training often fails to equip educators with methods tailored to African languages.

"Children are reading words without grasping meaning," explains Kelly Long, GADRA's primary education program manager. "We urgently need more isiXhosa books, more imaginative teaching methods, and investment into the development of African languages as academic languages in their own right."

This pattern reflects a national reality: in African-language schools, only about 13% of learners can read for meaning.

The making of an outlier