Brazil trip enlightens SA student leadership

THIRTEEN student leaders from various South African universities who recently returned from a trip to Brazil to study the country’s model for free higher education said it might not be possible to implement a similar programme here at the moment.

However, they felt free education for the poor and “missing middle” could be implemented by the South African government.

The fact-finding trip to Brazil where higher education is free at public universities was organised by En-novate along with partners Standard Bank, Investec and the Entrepreneurship Development Trust (EDT).

The visit followed the recent #FeesMustFall protests.

En-novate gives local entrepreneurs unique opportunities to connect with future global business partners. Co-founder Dan Brotman said Brazil had many similarities to South Africa.

These included the facts that both countries had a colonial past and high inequality levels.

“The aim of this trip was to expose student leaders, not only to a country that offers free education from basic to tertiary level, but to also have learnings about structural inequalities that Brazilians experience on a daily basis so we can avoid making those same mistakes,” Brotman said.

The student leaders were from the University of Pretoria, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, University of KwaZuluNatal, University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand and University of the Western Cape.

Brotman said they saw in Brazil that free tertiary education would not work if government could not afford it.

“If a government mismanages its own departments, it will create a bloated bureaucracy and mismanage its public universities, wasting a large amount of funds in the process,” he said.

Student leader Thabo Shingane, a political science honours student, said the trip had shown them that while higher education in Brazil was free, in reality it was only available to those who were rich and had access to good schools from basic level.

“This trip was an emotional rollercoaster because when you hear free education is accessible in other countries you feel hopeful for our own context,” Shingane said.

“But when we saw the way in which a lot of people couldn’t even get access to universities due to structural inequalities, it certainly hit home.”

Shingane said the experience had left all of the leaders more determined than ever to find solutions to the South African context.