Next Chapter Jozi was brought to life to address an issue many South Africans are well acquainted with: inequality. A major catalyst for this pervasive divide is the ever-growing national literacy crisis, with skewed access to resources severely widening the disparity between the privileged and the marginalised.
In response, Next Chapter Jozi, self-defined as a student-led literacy and STEM initiative, turned its focus towards expanding learners' access to books and educational experiences. As access to education is not confined to the classroom, Next Chapter Jozi's perspective positions it as something that encompasses the resources and opportunities that allow young people to develop their interests and engage with new ideas — Jenovic Lumu tells us how.
Next Chapter Jozi began with your concern about the gap between the potential learners have and the resources available to them. What was it that made you go from recognising the disparity between schools to believing that you could do something about it?
The turning point was a conversation between four of us at St John's College about the difference in resources between our school and schools so close to it. We could see that learners' opportunities to discover books and explore their interests were being shaped by which school they attended.
We also realised that our own school community had books and resources that were no longer being used. That gave us somewhere practical to start. We began by connecting those available resources with schools that could use them: approaching donors, collecting books and bringing other students into the work.
Breaking the problem into tasks we could organise made action feel possible. We could not solve educational inequality on our own, but we could take responsibility for a useful part of the work and build from there.
You started Next Chapter Jozi while a high school student yourself. How did this factor influence your approach to this issue, specifically when deciding what you could practically do to contribute?
Being a student made me think carefully about what we could offer with the time, skills and relationships we had. Book collections, sorting and school outreach were practical starting points. We could ask our own school communities to contribute, organise the resources and work with teachers on how they would be used. We could also develop learning activities around subjects we were studying ourselves.
It also meant recognising our limits.
Teachers understand their classrooms in ways we do not, and we have our own school responsibilities. Our contribution has to be manageable and useful to the people receiving it.
I see being student-led as an opportunity to show younger learners that someone close to their age can care about reading, enjoy science and take responsibility for their community. It also means learning to follow through on the commitments we make.
Your work brings literacy and STEM together, two areas that are traditionally trapped in their own educational silos. What connection do you see between the ability to read, comprehend and question information, and a learner's ability to engage with STEM? What led Next Chapter Jozi to approach these areas together?
Reading is part of doing science. A learner needs to understand an instruction, work out what a question is asking and explain why a result makes sense.
Questioning a text and questioning an experiment both require someone to look carefully at information rather than simply accept it.
Our rubber-band racer activity makes that connection practical. The illustrated learner booklet guides learners through building and testing a racer, measuring results and exploring energy, forces and friction. Reading has an immediate purpose: it helps you work out what to do and understand what happens. The practical challenge then gives you something worth reading and talking about.
That is why bringing literacy and STEM together makes sense to us. A learner can move between words, measurements and a physical model within the same activity. We want to support the confidence to understand an explanation, try an idea and explain the result in their own words.
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