| Welcome to BEFSA
Keith & Catherine Borien launched BEFSA in November 2004 to:
provide education and training for the many people of South Africa and beyond, who have been excluded, for whatever reason from learning
reduce poverty in the poorest communities of South Africa and beyond through educational and economic development
enable rural and township schools and the communities they serve to become agents for change, responsible for their own development
The reality confronting national and provincial governments in South Africa today is the sheer enormity of the challenges facing them to bring about major improvements in people’s lives. Equally local communities have come to realise that there will not be an instant solution to the years of poverty, and to the decades of neglect and educational impoverishment associated with conflict and social injustice.
The reality today is that many rural and township schools are characterised by an unqualified or underqualified teaching force, by an absence of teaching and learning materials and by sub standard teaching and learning environments. In the rural areas of South Africa it has tended to be a combination of all three. As a result many black schools have regressed or simply marked time. As a result families have watched as generations of children miss out on a basic education.
Despite the best intentions of local authorities, positive interventions are often hampered by a lack of resources, by a lack of consistent and effective leadership, by a lack of management and administrative capacity and by an absence of specialist support staff working in the field. It has become increasingly evident that the gap between schools in the developing world and the developed world is becoming wider. In South Africa these two worlds have coexisted uneasily since the dawn of apartheid in 1948 to the present day. The legacy of apartheid is such that today enormous differences exist between the opportunities available to children living in rural and township areas and children growing up in the former white areas.
In the midst of the poverty of the rural areas and the townships in which the majority of South African people live today, there is an urgent need to create and to nurture centres of educational excellence to counter the perception and reality of two worlds and to provide opportunities for children to reach their true potential
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