In preparation for the school Market Day, Elethu Themba Secondary School learners brush up on their financial literacy skills
Made possible through sponsorship by Investec’s Kgomo Project, 168 Grade 8 learners at Elethu Themba Secondary School in Eikenhof, Gauteng, played the Wealth Creation Game (aka “The Spaza Shop game”) in a one-day intervention.
The students create team companies and navigate their way through a game, where they need to make business and financial decisions. As they go along they keep a record of how their business is doing financially and at the end of the game they calculate their overall profits to see whose business was the most successful. This hands-on experience enables learners to understand the financial implications of business decisions.
These learners went through the JA Enterprise Dynamics Programme last year, where they set up a mini-business. In that programme the role STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) play in a variety of employment options, including self-employment, is explored.
These students are part of a pilot intervention that entails exposing this same cohort of learners to successive JA programmes as they move from primary school through high school.
Lebo Moholobela, HOD for Business Studies, expressed her enthusiasm about the programme and comented on how well it brought brought the school coursework to life for the students.
“The Grade 8 learners related well to the materials and responded positively to the questions asked by the facilitator. Even the more academically challenged students were responding well. This financial literacy programme has enhanced the skills and knowledge of the students in terms of understanding finances as opposed to simply recording numbers, as some students were doing previously. If this programme could be continuous the performance of students would improve even more, especially just before the exams, then this could be very helpful to them,” she said.
