Project Fundza: Public Education Dashboard

Project Information

  • Stakeholder: ED Platform
  • Students: Langa Kahla (UP), Sivenkosi Maqhula (UCT), Omolemo Matlou (UJ), Xichavo Maringa (UP).
  • Project Lead: Dhiren Seetharam, Dr. Quintin Williams
  • Project Mentors: Antonuis Mamphiswana
  • Year: 2016/2017

Project Description

Public Education forms a large part of the National Budget, however the poor performance in the national matric rate has remained low regardless. Project Fundza-platform is assigned to identify the needs and opportunities in the public education where outcomes can be improved and funding can be best directed, with regards to the deteriorating state of matric results and infrastructure. This project’s main objective is to assist the Department of Basic Education make informed decisions on how much and where to invest in a each province and school district. Moreover, the project also aims at helping parents to choose schools for their children based on school fees, facilities available, and learner-teacher ratio just to name a few. Project-Fundza further aims at finding out which schools perform better than others and the reasons for that in order to improve the quality of the poor performing schools.

In the 1st phase the Project Fundza Platform focused on creating a dashboard with the necessary graphs and tables visualising performance of matric results per Province and district, however the solution was limited due to the lack of relevant data, was also unable to produce a search box for the user to search for schools lack of time to complete the tasks. In addition the lack of skills of programming also contributed and the uncertainties in the data also contributed. During the second phase the Fundza-Platform focused on producing a search inbox for the user to search.

Student Remarks

The students believe that the DSIDE program is a positive impact on the outcomes of the different projects and that some of them being new to programming learned new programming languages particularly Django and HTML.

Author: Team + Nolihle Gulwa, B Tech Journalism, Walter Sisulu University.