At the end of 2021, I was invited by Innovation Edge to take part in their first Build Programme. Through it, I gained free access to an entrepreneurship course run by FURTHER. This afforded us 6 bi-weekly online workshops at the end of 2021 and into 2022 as well as 2 one-on-one meetings with a business coach. As an educator with limited knowledge of entrepreneurship or how to make a project truly sustainable, I grabbed the opportunity. I knew I would learn something along the way, but I didn’t realise how the programme would shape the trajectory of my career. By the end of it, I had registered a new company: Young Game Changers.
A challenge at the time
At the time, I was running a sole proprietorship called BushMaths, providing mathematics support to learners and training mathematics teachers, as well as producing content in various forms on different projects. My initial proposal for funding to Innovation Edge had been to roll out an educational resource of cards (I had developed for young children) into a rural, low socio-economic area in Mpumalanga. Innovation Edge had rightly responded that my project was not sustainable economically and that I should look at trying to improve that. Hence the offer of the FURTHER programme.
I remember that first online workshop so well. We were asked to elaborate on the actual problem. I had a solution in mind initially (the cards and some theory I had developed around implementing them), but really struggled to get to the core of the problem in my mind. I thought it was a mathematics problem, poor teaching of numeracy, lack of resources and so on. It was all those general issues, but the FURTHER team pressed me for more direct issues I could affect. As we got asked more and more questions, and pushed (in a good way) for more detail, the core problem I realised I was actually grappling with and hoping to solve, was bigger than mathematics. It was closer to analytical thinking and learning to problem-solve. This led me into the world of neuroscience, executive functions and understanding cognitive development of young children.
Turning thoughts into action
From that, Young Game Changers (YGC) was born (somewhere in the middle of the programme) and I have not looked back. I registered a PTY (Ltd) for YGC and re-branded the educational cards I had already developed to align with the new company. Friends offered to support me in the first print run of 5000 packs of cards (proudly printed in South Africa), and I started to run workshops, sharing with teachers how to create a bigger network of neural pathways for reasoning in young children using the concepts we had developed around the cards.
Towards the end of 2023, a local artisan I had worked with since 2015, helped me to make more educational resources from recycled cardboard and bottle tops and whatever else we could find. This is still running as our “Toys for trash” initiative from YGC, but we went on to work with local printers to manufacture some of those prototypes into resources we now also sell. That same local man is the one who also made the shelves and teacher desks for our recent ECD project. I have since expanded the YGC product range to also include kits we are making using not just products we make, but also other educational resources. A core part of our business is also sustainability. We remove all single-use plastic and re-package products we order, into reusable packaging. We do this for individual products or when we stock an ECD centre.
An impact that goes beyond funding
In the end, I didn’t receive any funding from Innovation Edge, but they gave me something far more valuable: the FURTHER programme and community. The course may only have lasted around 6 months, but the input and knowledge gained in that time has allowed me not only to launch YGC but to expand. I am still working on getting the online shop going, but I am excited and grateful for where we are at now. I appreciate the wonderful support, ideas and input from Lindsay and Ian, the group I did the workshops with, and my business coach during the programme. Thank you for being such a big part of conceptualising YGC, the birth of it and now being part of the community in which it is steadily growing.
