For many South Africans, the most inspiring moment in President Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation address was when he quoted the ‘late great Bra Hugh Masekela’:   ‘I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around, When they triumph over poverty …  I wanna lend a hand, Send me’.

Responding to this call, CIDER and the Division of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the School of Public Health and Family Medicine, UCT, are running a Maths ‘boot camp’ for 40 Grade 11 learners from Fezeka High School, Gugulethu.

One of the organisers explains: "our motivation is that we do research in the community, and we need to give back, with the tools we have access to. As a research unit, we are working for better health - and we know that education is one way to better health. We ourselves are teachers and researchers with some maths skills, and we want to share these with the communities where we do our research."

The organisers work closely with Dikakapa–Everyday Heroes (http://www.leadsa.co.za/articles/8335/dikakapa-a-series-of-inspirational-stories-2), an initiative to inspire and motivate young South Africans to use education to achieve their dreams. 

During the camp, learners will revise their syllabus as they head towards Matric, growing their confidence and preparing them to be in a position to apply for university entrance. Perhaps more importantly, they will get some exposure – for many, their first - to the university environment. During the 2017 UCT transformation workshops, many students from disadvantaged backgrounds described feeling alienated and lonely when they began their studies. Nontokozo Langwenya and Tammy Phillips, organisers of the ‘boot camp’, hope that the camp will help to change this. If it is successful, they plan to repeat the camp with other schools in future.

The faculty community had the opportunity to also "lend a hand". As the learners came from very disadvantaged backgrounds – sharing calculators, maths sets and other basic resources, the organisers put out a call for assistance to provide learners with the tools they needed for the camp and for school Maths. These included donations, volunteers to teach Maths, stationery and maths sets.