Duduzile ‘Brown’ Ndlovu. Photos: Karolina Komendera

Following a trip to an AIDS orphanage in Mpumalanga in the early 2000s, Kim Normand Dobrin realised that when children from disadvantaged backgrounds finished their Grade 12 schooling, there were limited opportunities for them to further their studies; bursaries were restricted to the top students only. So Dobrin set about fundraising R1 million to put 15 students through college. There was a subsequent realisation that simply ‘throwing money’ at the issue didn’t work effectively; there was a need for social support too. And so, in 2005, the Tomorrow Trust was founded to provid support and bursaries to orphaned and vulnerable children from Grade R through to tertiary level. Today, the vision is to provide holistic support going beyond academic work, to also include psychosocial development, exposure to different career options and, most recently, to help them become global citizens. Acting GM Taryn Rae says it’s in this last element that they introduced ‘4IR skills, techniques and opportunities’.

To this aim, the trust started a pilot in 2019 to improve the digital literacy of a group of 40 Grade 8 students. Duduzile ‘Brown’ Ndlovu, the trust’s ICT Programme lead, says that at the end of the course, an evaluation was held with the students to understand what they liked, and which skills were useful.