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

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.

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.

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.

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.