Thirty years in: Why SAILI’s story is bigger than a birthday

Most non-profits don’t make it this far.

In the well-studied US non-profit sector, roughly 12% of new organisations close within five years and by year ten, close to a third are gone, usually not because their cause stopped mattering, but because funding dried up, strategy stalled, or leadership couldn’t transition. Only about half of non-profits ever reach what researchers call long-term success at all.

South Africa’s own non-profit landscape is enormous, an estimated 100,000 registered NPOs, and perhaps 50,000 more operating unregistered. Within that crowded field, education and welfare organisations are especially exposed: donor priorities shift, government subsidies fluctuate, and economic downturns hit disposable income for giving before almost anything else.

Against that backdrop, thirty years of continuous operation for an education-focused NPO in South Africa isn’t just a milestone. It’s an outlier.

This year, SAILI turns 30. We think that’s worth pausing on, not for the sake of nostalgia, but because our history tells a larger story about what it’s taken to keep this work alive, and why it still matters.

Where we started

SAILI was founded in 1996, in the earliest years of post-apartheid South Africa, to widen access to Science, Maths and Industry education for learners who had been systematically shut out of it. It’s hard to overstate how deep that exclusion ran. At the end of apartheid, the odds of an African learner reaching matric were roughly four times worse than a white learners. As recently as 1970, only around 1 in 10 young South Africans had completed matric at all.

Our first supporter was the UK-based Gatsby Foundation and our early work matched the scale of the problem: systemic interventions like teacher training and whole-school programmes, aimed at shifting outcomes across entire institutions. Over time, we transitioned to local funding and learned something important, our scholarship programme, which placed high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds into effective schools, was consistently our most successful intervention.

Learning to adapt

In 2009 we joined the SEEDS consortium, backed by the Netherlands Embassy, doubling down on systemic change. Then 2011 happened. The global downturn forced us to streamline the scholarship model — leaner, more cost-effective, with families more directly involved. That leaner version turned out to be our strongest yet.

In 2013, we partnered with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and the Western Cape Education Department on SAILI TARGET, working to improve underperforming high schools directly. COVID-19 and the disruptions that followed made it impossible to continue. But it also gave us clarity: in a period when resources and attention were stretched thinner than ever, our energy belonged where it had always worked best, scholarships.

Where the gap still is

Here’s the context that makes this history matter beyond SAILI itself. Since 1994, South Africa has made real, measurable progress on access, primary school completion is now around 95%, and matric attainment among young adults has climbed from roughly a third to over half. Headline matric pass rates hit 87.3% in 2024, the highest on record.

But access and quality moved at very different speeds. The system today is sharply bimodal: about 80% of schools underperform relative to a functional 20%, and roughly 80% of the country’s maths distinctions come from just 200 of its 6,600 secondary schools. Of every 100 children who started Grade 1 in 2007, only 51 reached matric, 40 passed it, and just 17 achieved the bachelor’s-level pass needed for university. The topline pass rate everyone quotes is calculated only from the learners who made it far enough to sit the exam, it says nothing about who was filtered out along the way, often by poverty and under-resourcing rather than ability.

That’s the gap SAILI has spent three decades working inside. Policy expanded the right to education. It didn’t equalise the quality of it. Talent, it turns out, is distributed evenly. Opportunity isn’t.

Where we are now

Since 2012, SAILI adjusted their model to focus our scholarships on placing learners into low-cost, quality state schools close to where they live — partnering with Claremont High School, South Peninsula High School, Rylands High School, Spine Road High School, and Mondale High School.

We believe education doesn’t have to be exclusive or expensive to be excellent. Every rand donated to SAILI extends that belief a little further, into one more classroom, one more learner whose potential was never in question, only their access to it.

Thirty years in, the mission hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how precisely we’ve learned to deliver on it.

If SAILI’s story resonates, here’s how you can be part of the next thirty years: donate and sponsor a scholarship. Every rand goes toward placing another capable learner in a school built to match their potential.