Description

The SayPro has established its community outreach footprint in South Africa, through the Joint Aviation Awareness Programme initiative. The initiative reaches over 5000 learners annually through school visits, career exhibitions and airshows. Learners reached are mainly from rural and semi-urban parts of South Africa.

The main aim of the programme is to ensure that learners are exposed to career opportunities available in the aviation industry as well as bursary opportunities offered by the various companies in aviation. In our quest to encourage learners to work hard to achieve the best results that will enable them to to qualify for bursary opportunities, the SayPro is offering an opportunity for them to improve their grades in the STEMI subjects. This is because  most learners who are interested in applying for bursaries are limited by the shortfalls experienced by the South African school system when it comes to STEM education.

In most parts of the country especially in rural and semi-urban areas, there is a scarcity of Maths and Science teachers. As a result, teachers who teach these subjects often teach a high number of learners at a time without material resources such as libraries, science labs or equipment that makes learning interesting and less challenging for the learners.

As a result, many of these learners are limited in entering the sector because excellent performance in Maths and Science is a barometer used by most bursary and scholarship programmes in the aviation sector. 

From the socio-economic development level, shortfalls in STEM are also cited as a constraint to accessing tertiary opportunities in general. Reports by the Centre for Risk Analysis’s report titled “Education is the single greatest obstacle to socio-economic advancement in South Africa states that; only 3.1% of black people over the age of 20 have a university degree, in comparison to 13.9% of Indian and 18.3% of white people. Additionally, only 6.9% of matric candidates pass maths with 70-100% and, in the poorest schools, less than 1 in 100 matric students will receive a distinction for maths.

The SayPro programme is a SayPro Socio-Economic Development (SED) project that aims to instil confidence and improve the performance in Maths and Science for learners in the rural areas of South Africa. This is achieved by identifying and partnering with existing and proven successful programmes or designing Maths and Science tutor projects in a community and providing support for the sustainability of these projects.