CREATING & SUSTAINABILITY

How the Bright Kid Foundation achieves sustainability:

• We work closely with established early-childhood development NGO’s
• Edutainers® are only allocated to competent trained teachers
• Edutainers® are well equipped and function as excellent pre-schools.
  Equipment includes:
• books
• educational toys
• furniture
• This high-quality learning environment attracts fee-paying parents

It is vital for Corporate Social Investment (CSI) to be sustainable. A social investment yields a stream of social benefits which accrue to the individuals directly involved (the pupils and teachers in the Edutainer®) and to the community at large.

An Edutainer® is a sizeable investment, and donors are not expected to provide additional funds over time to keep it operating. The teacher or the community running the Edutainer® need to generate the funds to pay salaries, feed the children, supply educational equipment, and maintain the Edutainer®. Teachers and communities are carefully vetted before they receive Edutainers®, to ensure that they will be able to make effective use of this significant, free capital asset. Edutainers® can be registered as pre-schools, so the school will receive some government grants in addition to the modest school fees they receive. It is very rare that the parents of all children attending will be able to pay fees as there is usually high unemployment in the poor areas where Edutainers® are placed. However, parents practice ‘uBuntu; a form of social responsibility to the community. Fee paying parents will allow a certain number of unemployed parents to send their children to the Edutainer® pre-school without paying fees.

There are always a number of ‘garage crèches’ in the poor communities receiving Edutainers®. These usually consist of ‘shack’ schools without trained teachers and without adequate sanitation or educational toys. The dramatic delivery of the Edutainer®, which is fully decorated on the outside and delivered by a crane truck, is often attended by local dignitaries and the whole community and this delivery provides superb publicity to the Edutainer®, encouraging parents to enroll their children in the Edutainer® school. .They will send their children to the well equipped Edutainer® pre-school in preference to a shack school and the school fees generated help make the Edutainer® sustainable.

In spite of careful planning on the part of the Donor and Bright Kid Foundation, social development investment in poorer communities always involves some degree of risk. Teachers may fall ill, communities may move, and employment creating factories may leave the school area. If the community is re-located, we are able to move the Edutainer® with the community. However, in some cases this is not possible. In a recent survey of the Edutainers® we placed, we found that approximately 3.5% of the units placed were not functioning properly as pre-schools. These were all Edutainers® placed before 2003. In these cases, we remove the container, and completely re-furbish and re-paint it, to make it equivalent to a new Edutainer®. By the time that this process is completed, the costs are the same as our normal finishing of used containers. Once the re-finishing is complete, we are able to re-cycle the newly finished fully equipped container. Containers which have been removed from their original location are marked with an “R” after the location place name in the list of Edutainers® delivered.