Over 3,000 schools still lack basic sanitation. The digital divide runs just as deep.

Infrastructure · June 2026 · 17 min read

When people talk about the digital divide in South African schools, they usually mean Wi-Fi access, computers, or tablets. These things matter. But they are built on a more fundamental foundation — and in thousands of schools across the country, that foundation has not yet been laid.

The 2023 National Education Infrastructure Management System (NEIMS) report documented over 3,000 schools still using pit latrines — basic, often dangerous sanitation structures that pose real health and safety risks to learners and teachers. Earlier NEIMS data had noted over 5,000 schools with non-functional toilets, and 5,800 with an unreliable water supply. In some cases, a single tap serves hundreds of learners.

Physical and digital infrastructure collapse together

The connection between physical and digital infrastructure is not coincidental. Schools that lack safe toilets also tend to lack reliable electricity, stable internet, and functioning computer labs. The Amnesty International report Broken and Unequal documented that nearly 1,000 schools had no sports facilities, 239 had no electricity, and 37 had no sanitation at all. These schools are clustered in specific provinces — Limpopo, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal — and in the country's poorest quintile communities.

Equal Education's 2023 research report, Schooling Under Unusual Conditions, found a direct correlation between poor school infrastructure and learner absenteeism. Overcrowded conditions — classrooms with 40 to 60 learners, and in extreme cases, Grade 9 classes with over 135 learners — were shown to increase the likelihood of both learner and teacher absence. When the space is so overwhelmed that a teacher cannot physically move between desks, the quality of instruction deteriorates for everyone, but most severely for the learners at the back.

"There was a great deal of overcrowding. Contact between the teacher and the student — particularly those at the back — is almost impossible."

When the building fails, the meal disappears too

Infrastructure, in most reporting on South African schools, means buildings: classrooms, toilets, electricity, internet. But for millions of learners, the most consequential piece of infrastructure a school provides is not a structure at all. It is a meal.

The National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) feeds over 9 million learners — Statistics South Africa puts the figure closer to 9.7 million — across nearly 20,000 schools every school day, funded through a dedicated conditional grant of more than R7 billion. For learners in Quintile 1 to 3 schools, where the programme is targeted, this is frequently the only guaranteed meal of the day. Stats SA frames the scale plainly: roughly three in every four of South Africa's 12.7 million public school learners depend on the programme in some form.

The connection to the rest of this story is direct, not metaphorical. Equal Education's research linking poor infrastructure to absenteeism, and the overcrowding documented in Gauteng and Limpopo classrooms, do not happen in isolation from the nutrition programme — they happen in the same schools, often on the same days. When a school is closed by protest action, by an infrastructure failure such as the 2023 Gauteng cholera outbreaks, or simply by the kind of dysfunction that produces chronic teacher and learner absenteeism, the meal does not happen either. For a learner whose only reliable food access is the mid-morning school meal, an infrastructure failure is not an inconvenience. It is the removal of a second basic need on top of the first.

The programme itself runs on infrastructure that rarely makes it into NEIMS reports: more than 50,000 Volunteer Food Handlers — one for roughly every 200 learners — who cook in school kitchens that face the same maintenance backlogs as the classrooms around them. A broken stove, an unreliable water supply, or a kitchen with no functioning electricity does not just affect a "facility." It affects whether 200 children eat that day. Any account of South Africa's school infrastructure crisis that stops at toilets, electricity, and internet access is describing only part of what "infrastructure" means to the child sitting in the classroom.

The Gauteng paradox

The infrastructure crisis is not limited to rural provinces. Gauteng — the country's wealthiest province and the seat of its economic activity — has significant overcrowding and infrastructure backlogs in its own schools. The 2023 cholera outbreaks in parts of Gauteng exposed how inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure creates public health risks in communities that are otherwise considered "served."

The DBE's 2023 presentation to Parliament noted that 23% of Grade 3 learners in Quintile 1 schools are taught in classes exceeding 50 learners. In Grade 6, 47% of learners in Quintile 1 schools are in classes of over 50. In Quintile 5 schools — the most well-resourced — those numbers are 4% or lower. The same classroom space that is a constraint in Limpopo is a crisis in parts of Soweto.

This is the backdrop against which one of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act's most consequential infrastructure requirements is now being implemented. Signed into law in September 2024 and proclaimed in full that December, BELA makes Grade R — previously offered on a best-effort basis by many schools and ECD centres — a compulsory part of basic education for the first time. On paper, this is a straightforward win for the early-years agenda this research touches on elsewhere. In practice, it means an additional grade's worth of classrooms, in a system where, as the figures above show, close to half of Grade 6 classes in Quintile 1 Gauteng schools already run above 50 learners. Compulsory Grade R does not arrive with its own buildings. It arrives as additional demand on the same overcrowded square metres this section has just described — making the timing of BELA's rollout and the timing of South Africa's classroom backlog two halves of the same constraint.

What "dysfunctional" actually means

Civil society organisations responding to South Africa's matric results regularly call on the Department of Basic Education to focus less on the headline pass rate and more on what they describe as the "rehabilitation of dysfunctional schools." The phrase has circulated for over a decade — most famously in a widely repeated claim that around 80% of South African schools were "dysfunctional." The Department has since moved away from that binary label, describing it as destructive and demoralising, and preferring to assess schools on performance data instead. But the underlying condition the word is trying to capture has not gone away, and it connects directly to the infrastructure picture described above.

Researchers who study these schools describe dysfunction as a cluster of conditions that travel together: unstable school management, weak or absent leadership, low staff and learner morale, normalised absenteeism among both teachers and learners, unclear academic standards, high staff turnover, and — in the more severe cases — disruption and violence that interrupt teaching on a regular basis. None of these are, strictly speaking, infrastructure problems. But they are not separable from infrastructure problems either.

The geography makes the connection explicit. The schools the 2023 NEIMS report identifies as lacking electricity, water, and sanitation cluster in Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal — the same provinces where research on school functionality consistently finds the highest rates of management instability and staff absenteeism. A school where the toilets have been broken for years, the photocopier does not work, and the principal's office has no functioning phone line is not merely under-resourced. It is a school where the basic administrative scaffolding — registers, reports, communication with the district office — becomes genuinely difficult to maintain, which is itself one of the markers researchers use to identify "dysfunction." Physical collapse and institutional collapse are not two separate crises arriving at the same address. In the schools this report is about, they are frequently the same crisis, described from two different angles.

This matters for what technology can and cannot do. No app fixes a broken sewage line, and no platform restores a principal's authority in a school where governance has genuinely failed. But some of the administrative scaffolding that breaks down first — attendance registers, communication with parents, tracking of which learners have fallen behind — is exactly the kind of paperwork-heavy, manually maintained system that a lightweight digital tool can support even where the physical building around it is struggling. It will not turn a dysfunctional school into a functional one. But it can keep some of the most basic accountability mechanisms running in conditions where, currently, they often simply stop.

The infrastructure of language: an invisible wall at Grade 4

South Africa's visible infrastructure problems — broken toilets, no electricity, crumbling classrooms — are documented, photographed, and debated in Parliament. A less visible form of infrastructure failure receives almost no column space: the moment in Grade 4 when most learners are asked to stop learning in their home language and start learning in English or Afrikaans.

South Africa's Language in Education Policy allows children to receive instruction in their mother tongue through Grades R to 3. From Grade 4 onward, the language of learning and teaching switches — in most schools — to English or Afrikaans. For more than 80% of learners from African language backgrounds, this is a switch to a second or third language. They are not merely learning in a new language; they are being asked to learn new content — mathematics, science, history — through a medium they have not yet mastered.

The results appear clearly in the PIRLS data. South Africa scored last among all 57 participating countries in the 2021 assessment, recording the largest decline in reading outcomes of any country in the study. The 2030 Reading Panel — convened by former Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka — found that 80% of Grade 3 learners cannot comprehend their reading material, and that by Grade 6 nearly 70% lack proficiency in the language in which they are being taught. At current trajectories, the panel projected it would take 80 years for all South African children to read for meaning.

"Learners who receive instruction in their mother tongue during their early years perform better when they move over to English from Grade Four. It not only improves academic outcomes but also fosters inclusivity and respect for cultural diversity."

— University of the Western Cape Centre for African Language Teaching, 2024

The language wall is also an infrastructure problem, in the practical sense: there are not enough trained teachers who can deliver the curriculum in African languages, not enough textbooks and learning materials in those languages, and not enough policy will to close the gap between what the Language in Education Policy says and what happens in classrooms. UNESCO has found that children learning to read in a familiar language are 30% more likely to comprehend their reading before high school. South Africa's policy creates the opposite condition for most of its learners — and the literacy deficit it generates propagates upward through every subsequent year of schooling, invisible in the infrastructure census but present in every Grade 8 classroom where a learner cannot follow a lesson delivered in a language they were never fully taught.

Two schools, one department: the fee divide made physical

When infrastructure data is aggregated at the national or provincial level, it can obscure a division that is immediately legible to anyone who visits two schools on the same morning. Drive from a township school in Soweto to a former Model C school in Sandton, and the infrastructure gap becomes concrete — not in statistics but in what the eye takes in: cracked plaster versus renovated classrooms, a single shared toilet block versus multiple maintained bathrooms, a teacher at the board with no visual aids versus a SmartBoard on every classroom wall.

These two schools sit under the same Department of Basic Education. They write the same CAPS curriculum. Their learners will sit the same matric exams. But they are not operating in the same financial reality, and the physical environment in which learning happens is not a neutral variable. Research shows that 64.1% of schools achieving 100% matric pass rates are Quintile 5 institutions. Among schools with pass rates below 20%, 56.3% are Quintile 1. The infrastructure a learner inhabits is one of the strongest predictors of the outcome they will reach.

The quintile funding system was designed to direct more government money toward the poorest schools — and it does this. But it cannot close the gap that fee income creates on the other side. A Model C school collecting R30,000 per learner from parents receives more than 24 times the government's per-learner allocation for a Quintile 1 school, before fundraising, donor contributions, or the kind of parental investment that functions as invisible infrastructure: tutors, data bundles, textbooks bought in advance, laptops. The 2026 Gauteng budget shortfall — R444 million in the current financial year, R160 million more forecast for the next — is now beginning to press on even well-resourced schools, tightening the room that the fee system had previously held open. The two tiers of South Africa's school system are not just unequal. They are structurally unable to converge.

The connectivity divide, in numbers

"Mobile-first" is easy to say and easy to misunderstand. The assumption behind it — that South African learners and teachers mostly carry smartphones — is broadly true. The assumption that this means connectivity is solved is not. The gap between those two facts is where most ed-tech designed for South African schools quietly fails.

Around 33% of South Africa's population lives in rural areas, concentrated in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Eastern Cape — the same three provinces that, as described above, carry the heaviest burden of physical infrastructure failure. On the device side, the numbers look, on paper, like a solved problem: South Africa had 118.6 million active mobile connections by early 2024, equivalent to 195.4% of the population — meaning the average person effectively carries close to two SIM-enabled devices. Among teachers specifically, smartphone ownership exceeds 90%, according to AUDA-NEPAD's continental EdTech analysis — among the highest rates on the continent, far above the 30–65% range seen in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya.

The gap between 195% and 75% is the story. It means the device is, for the most part, no longer the barrier — but the gap between owning a smartphone and being able to use it reliably for learning remains enormous, and it is not primarily a technology gap so much as an electricity and affordability gap. Rural households frequently face unstable power supply that disrupts charging and connectivity even where mobile coverage exists, and data costs can consume a disproportionate share of a household's monthly budget — by some estimates, a basic data package can absorb more than 15% of household spending in rural communities. A learner is not failing to engage with a digital tool because they lack a phone. They are failing to engage because the phone has 4% battery, the nearest tower is overloaded, and the data bundle ran out four days ago.

This is the precise condition that "mobile-first" needs to mean, if the phrase is to be more than marketing. Not "works on a phone" — almost everything does, in a demo, on a fast connection, with a full battery. But: works when the connection drops mid-session and resumes without losing data; works when a teacher can only get online for twenty minutes after the school day, on a shared family phone, with a fraction of a gigabyte left for the week. The infrastructure gap this report describes is not only about what schools lack. It is about designing for the conditions schools and the families around them actually have — which, on the connectivity side, is a far narrower window than the headline device numbers suggest.

The market this is being built into

The connectivity gap described above is not only a barrier — it is also, framed differently, the reason a South African EdTech sector exists at all, and why it is growing quickly. According to IMARC Group's market analysis, South Africa's EdTech market reached USD 1,254.1 million in 2025, and is projected to reach USD 3,258.2 million by 2034 — a compound annual growth rate of nearly 11% over the coming decade. The growth drivers cited read almost like a checklist of the conditions described in this piece: rising digital literacy, increasing internet penetration, a structural shift toward mobile-first learning, and government investment in digital infrastructure through initiatives like the National Digital and Future Skills Strategy.

South Africa's position within this is, in relative terms, a strong one. The broader Africa EdTech market was valued at roughly USD 7.3 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 19.2 billion by 2034 — and South Africa alone accounts for an estimated 36% of Africa's e-learning market, the largest single-country share on the continent, ahead of Nigeria and Kenya. That position rests substantially on the device and connectivity advantages described above: South Africa's teachers and learners are, by African standards, unusually well-equipped on paper to participate in mobile-first education.

AUDA-NEPAD's continental EdTech strategy frames this as a "leapfrogging" opportunity — the same argument made about mobile money succeeding across Africa ahead of traditional banking infrastructure. The logic transfers directly to education: a continent that was never going to retrofit smartboards and computer labs into every classroom can, in principle, deliver digital learning through the devices that already exist in teachers' and parents' pockets. But leapfrogging only works if what gets built is designed for the infrastructure that actually exists — offline-capable, low-data, resilient to interrupted connections — rather than a smaller, cheaper version of tools built for reliable broadband. This is the market, and the design constraint, that any ed-tech platform operating in South African no-fee schools is building into, whether it acknowledges it or not.

Technology that accounts for the real environment

Building educational technology for South African schools without accounting for these conditions is a design failure. A platform that requires fast internet, expensive hardware, or sustained electricity access does not serve the schools that need support most. A quiz module that only works on a laptop is useless in a school where learners bring smartphones but no Wi-Fi exists. A communication tool that assumes parents have data and time to read messages presupposes a home environment that does not exist for most Quintile 1 families.

This is why iSkool was built mobile-first, with offline capability in mind, and with the understanding that a learner in Landulwazi might have a data-limited Android phone and a teacher might be managing 55 learners with no teaching assistant. The product has to earn its place in that environment — not assume a different one.

South Africa's infrastructure gap is real and large, and software alone cannot close it. But software designed honestly — with eyes open to the actual conditions in which it will be used — can at least refuse to make things worse. That is the floor iSkool was built from.