The Unit is a learning organisation committed to social change, working with rural schools and communities to unleash the power and voice of rural places; to transform schools and communities into places of learning, care, development, and hope. The Unit's work is grounded in a vision of sustainable, vibrant rural communities united by a spirit of learning where young people and communities become the creators of their futures, unleashed from the limitations of the past.

The Unit emerges out of an appreciation for the depth of the challenges facing rural schooling and development, a critique of development approaches of the past, and an affirmation of the hope and possibilities tapped by more human centred methodologies of social change

2. The Birth of the Unit

For more than 10 years, Mandela has used the energy of his heart to work with the private sector to build schools - mostly in rural areas in South Africa. 140 schools have been built nation wide. 55 of these schools are located in the Eastern Cape. While built through private sector funds, these schools are public ordinary schools; educators, curricula, and day to day provisioning and support are managed by the provincial Department of Education through the local district office.

A range of people visited schools in the years following their opening. Some schools were exciting in their innovations and commitment; far too many of them did not reflect the energy of Mandela's imagination. A national audit was undertaken that carefully documented the prevalence of under performance in these schools. The experience highlighted a simple conclusion - a building does not make a school...

The experience motivated the Nelson Mandela Foundation to take a step back to ask, what do we mean by a 'performing school' in the context of rural South Africa? The history of rural education in South Africa does not have its roots in a philosophy of building upon the potential and powers of rural learners. Education was largely driven by the overlapping economic agenda of building a migrant and low paid urban industrial working class and political agenda of undermining the power, creativity, and knowledge systems of the African rural majority.

A study was commissioned to explore the experience of education amongst the rural poor, and the visions of people living in rural areas regarding educational change. The process concluded that while there is enormous support for education amongst rural learners and parents, it is not currently serving the majority of rural learners, either as individuals or as communities. While a few exceptional learners may find a pathway to further education and employment (often urban in orientation), the majority of learners are not leaving schooling with the tools to navigate their best lives. Young people, for the most part, describe a sense of feeling 'stuck'. Importantly, there is almost no relationship between schools and imaginations of community development.

Several ideas emerged from this experience. The first idea is that the experience of rural areas is currently not well understood. The second idea is that rural schools are for the most part not serving rural learners or rural communities. This idea leads to the possibility that the very concept of rural schools has to be re-imagined in the context of contemporary rural South Africa. The third idea is that in order for rural schools to become more relevant, rural schooling and rural unity development must start to know each other better. The final idea is that sustainable in rural schools may depend upon a methodology that builds and trusts rural communities ie to a better understanding of the development challenges they face, and the mobilisation of change relating to this understanding.

Given these ideas, there is very little understanding of how rural schools and communities - given particular histories - can transform themselves into something new. The work of rural provincial Departments of Education must focus on the basic processes of systemic and school improvement; there is little space for the more detailed and creative work required to establish new and relevant models for schools to re-create themselves. Further, the instinct of most institutions - university based and otherwise - is to approach school change work from within the boundaries of the 'education discipline' rather than incorporating the more interdepartmental lens .required from any understanding of 'community development.' Finally, models of school change deep history of the 'expert outsider'; despite good intentions these models too often slip into supporting the deep history of placing power outside of the boundaries of communities themselves.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, Fort Hare University, and the Eastern Cape Provincial Department of Education came together to establish a unit dedicated to the challenge of rethinking and rebuilding education and social development serving rural and poor communities in the context of these challenges.

3.Organisational Aims

There are five overlapping aims of the work of the Unit:

1.Rural School and Community Transformation: Working with schools and communities in rural and poor areas to create methods and deepen our understanding of sustainable processes of school and community transformation.

2. New Methodologies for Development: To develop, analyse, and deepen understanding about social l development methodologies designed to unleash local human agency

3. New Knowledge: To create a space for the generation of new thinking and new vocabularies in area of rural school and community development, committed to knowledge that opens up more possibilities for action. To undertake research serving this aim.

4. New Possibilities for Schooling: To develop and demonstrate radically new possibilities for a schooling in the context of building democracy, development, freedom, and hope

5. Networks of Knowledge and Practice: To facilitate the building of an 'alliance' of people and organisations working to transform rural communities and schooling, to learn and share knowledge to ensure the widest impact of the work, provincially and beyond.

4. Programme of Work

There are three core programme streams of work of the Unit for the financial years of 2005 and 2006. Several activity areas are attached to each stream:

1.Organisation for Innovation and Learning: The founding partners of the Unit - the NMF, UFH and Eastern Cape Department of Education - were committed to building an innovative Organisation facilitating innovation and learning in the sector of education and development. This stream of work focuses on the creation of this organisational form. There are three core activity areas:

1.1 Fellowship Programme: To create the area of rural schooling and development as a research niche area for the University of Fort Hare;

1.2 Seminar Series: To deepen public discourse on issues of freedom, democracy and development by providing a space to 'shake up' our ways of thinking, talking, and imaging of rural school and community development;

1 3. Demonstration Institute: To create a demonstration institute which models in practice radically new possibilities for schooling and whole community development in the context of a democratic South Africa, reflecting wisdoms and aspirations of liberators in South Africa and across our borders.

2 Methodologies for Innovation and Social Change: The formation of the Unit was inspired by a critique of the traditional patterns of development work, largely framed by 'outsider driven' methodologies. Sustainable and generative methodologies for social development depend on the facilitation of local agents, deepened and widened leadership networks, and effective organisational forms of action, reflection and learning. There are currently three activity areas within this Programme Stream. This area will develop innovative leadership development programmes in the medium and long terms.

2.1. School Community Organising Strategy: This activity area represents the central organising strategy of the Unit, seeking to build internalised, sustainable, action and learning oriented local vehicles for school and community change. It aims to provide methodological approaches to the formation of local development networks attached to municipal and other local networks for action.

2.2. Youth Change Agent Mobilisation: This programme is designed to mobilise young people (inside and outside of school) as agents of change, and deepen the organisation of young people within a network of community builders.

2 3. Local Socio Economic Development: This activity area focuses on new methodologies and systems for local economic development, as it relates to school and community development. This activity area is currently focused on building local economic development possibilities through models that link school provisioning markets (feeding schemes, uniforms, school resources, and infrastructure) to sustainable and democratic local economic enterprise.

3. Learning and Teaching – Curriculum, Tools and Pedagogy: Ultimately the transformation of schools rests with linking a new understanding of schooling with innovative practices in the classroom. This programme focuses our attention on curricular and teacher education methodologies, with the aim of shifting schools into centres of excellence, fun, care and community development. It seeks to build model curricular and teacher support methods suitable to the rural context, and share these within a network of teacher educator developments in sub Saharan Africa. There are two main activity areas. The first focuses on innovative curricular development and school based teacher education. The second focuses the use of new technologies, and particularly information and communication technologies, sustainable and creative investments in the context of rural schooling

Figure 1: Organisational Activities [PMG note: Diagram not included]

5.Democracy, Development and Freedom

My Government's commitment to create a people-centred society of liberty binds us to the pursuit of the goals of freedom from want, freedom from hunger' freedom from deprivation, freedom from ignorance, freedom from suppression and freedom from fear. These freedoms are fundamental to the guarantee of human dignity. (Nelson Mandela, in his Inaugural Address as first President of a democratic South Africa to a Joint Sitting of Parliament, 24 May 1994).

The Nelson Mandela Foundation's focus on rural education is rooted in an appreciation for the deep interconnections between democracy, development and freedom.

Nobe Loreate Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze(Dreze and Sen ,2002;Sen,1999) advance a r of ideas about the relationship between participation, freedoms and development. Sen and Dreze regard freedom as both a 'means' and an end' of development. They argue first that development (the 'ends' of development) can only be judged by the expansion of substantive human freedoms - not merely by economic growth, technical progress or social modernization. At me time, they argue that substantive freedoms are the primary determinant (principal means) of individuals' social effectiveness or agency - that there is an exceedingly important relationship between the enhancements of freedom and social participation

The notion of freedom is connected to a concept of human agency, which is placed as a central of social development. Agency refers to the role of an individual as a participant in economic, political and social action.

The role of a state becomes centrally linked to the expansion of real freedoms, and the elimination of ‘unfreedoms' for people in society, rather than to notions such as economic growth or technical advances per se. Freedoms are largely the capacities to engage in the activities that enhance the lives we lead Unfreedoms include the things that undermine the capacity for positive social -poverty, tyranny, social deprivation, unemployment, illiteracy. Development is contingent then on a set of 'jointly relevant concerns' impacting freedom, including education, health care and social security.

These ideas link democracy and development.

Democracy resides not so much I electoral arid parliamentary processes, but in deepening and broadening the participation of citizens in social life, and their active engagement in public issues that affect their day to-day lives. In this sense, democracy goes beyond the limits of 'voter democracy' to new formulations of 'active democracy and concepts of deep participation.

6. What is Social Change?

The Unit’s work is framed by an ongoing exploration of what creates effective social change in a democratic South Africa.

We place purposeful human activity as the central driver of social development. While the structure of society and the mechanisms of social and economic construction have momentum and effect on how a society operates, these 'structural' elements are ultimately within the power n choice and action. Human beings are ultimately not 'smaller' or less powerful than the systems they create. We are responsible for rather than victims of the social realities we have constructed together with generations past.

The question of social change becomes, how do we create an environment where human agency shed?'

We suggest that purposeful action (the driver of democracy, development and freedom) can be unleashed by the elimination of 'unfreedoms' and the expansion of substantive freedoms. We that there are four freedom-unfreedom levers for change: structural, capabilities, ships, and consciousness. This suggestion is a critique of models that locate sustainable in any one of these elements alone, whether structural (often focused on economic capabilities (often bounded by notions of human capital), or consciousness (often focused on individual transcendence).

[PMG Note: Diagram(Figure 1) :not included]

7. Organisational Principles

The principles underlying the process of the Unit's work flows roughly from the ideas of social change above. The starting point is the idea that human agency (aliveness, hope, relatedness, participation) are the drivers for social change and development. There are at least four contributors to sustainable agency - the structure of society, capabilities, social consciousness, and organisation. Twelve principles provide the 'solid ground' for the Unit to hold these relationships (structure, capabilities, consciousness and organisation) in place. Five of them are illustrated below.

• Re-finding the source...

The basic principle is that all people (and communities of people) are a source of power and creativity. There are historical and personal implications of this principle.

Both at the level of communities and individuals, histories have an effect of either tapping into this essential powerfulness or undermining it. In the context of a colonised history, essential powerfulness has been eroded and maligned. Intellectuals including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, among others, review the history of colonialism in Africa and suggest the depth of its impact on issues of economy, politics, culture, and the conception of self. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarises. The effect of the cultural bomb (dropped by imperialism) is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, their languages, their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland...' (1986: 3). In the words of Chinua Achebe, colonialism put a knife in things that held us together, and things fall apart...' The principle of 're-finding the source' is close to a deep commitment to both understand and create a decolonising project.

Change - personal, organisational and social - comes from within. The research of the Nelson Mandela Foundation reinforced the importance of self-mobilisation even more in the context of rural realities, and relocates success and sustainability in relationship to self mobilising capacities.

• There are no easy answers...

At the most basic level, the history of school transformation work here and abroad demonstrate that there are no 'quick fixes' to the complex problems underlying schools that are not serving rural learners and communities... The research of the NMF among others has demonstrated the complexity of the questions facing rural school and community development, reaching to new imaginations for rural development, and new conceptions of schooling. Further, the problematic of shifting rural schooling and communities reaches to understandings of personal transformation, organisational development, models of economic development, and social change. There are no simple short cuts to any of these.

In this way, 'there are no easy answers' is part of truth-telling...

This principle helps us to avoid regressing into the 'outsider knows the answer' rut of historical development work. Ideas for local school and community development are by definition seeded in a process of authentic engagement with the complexity of local contexts, as well as ideas generated from other experiences and localities. It helps us create a new type of relationship with schools and communities whereby community members authentically sense that if they do not engage in the process of finding solutions, solutions will not magically appear from an 'other'.

A commitment to the long-term process of development is an important part of this principle. School development work is scarred by quick fixes and short-term processes of engagement.

At a more philosophical level, this principle lays under any mobilising philosophy. It is consistent with the Freirian conviction that powerfulness begins when the world is recreated as a problem to be worked on and solved.

• Centring the rural experience

Through the processes of industrial capitalism, and arguably more recently through the deepening of consumer cultures internationally, the rural experience has come to represent the 'periphery' while urban centres (and particularly the flash urban symbols) have increasingly overtaken the notion of 'centre'. Castells work points to these processes. Thus, rural areas become seen through a lens of what is not there, rather than through what *is* there. The hegemony of urban symbols often makes this urban bias lens transparent.

Centring the rural experience suggests that we consciously work to challenge an urban bias through bringing the rural experience to the centre. Rural areas become as much defined by their liveliness and strengths as defined by any development struggles. In a real way, the 'way of the future' is as much located in rural ways of life as urban ones.

The centring of the rural experience pushes us to be conscious of how deeply a 'deficit model' of rural areas has been socially constructed - through institutions including schooling. White we privilege participatory approaches to development, this is consistent with engaging critically with any internalised 'deficit' model among rural communities themselves.

This principle suggests that 'urban-rural' divide is more of an interconnected, mutually defined continuum. There are relationships and a continuum of the concept in terms of defining any one community. Further, within any one person he or she may have 'urban' and 'rural' identities. To the extent that they represent 'conditions of being', they exist along side each other.

• Communities and schools can create each other

This principle asserts that there is a co-creation possibility between lively communities and lively schools in rural areas. The research undertaken by the Nelson Mandela Foundation begins to identify the disjuncture between local schools on the one hand, and discussions and visions for rural community development on the other. Schools at best are seen to assist a few individual learners to escape rural poverty to largely urban livelihoods and opportunities, but they are not seen to service the livelihood of the majority of rural learners. Moreover, they are not seen to be connected to any imagination for local community development. Discussions of relationships between schools and communities are at best a discussion of how community members serve schools, but rarely understood in the other direction.

The principle does not assert that rural schools should only prepare rural learners for rural livelihoods. The principle does suggest that in order to open up opportunities for rural learners to navigate their best lives, the school must come to service issues of community development better, including issues of structure, capabilities, and power.

A well performing school in the context of rural poverty is not only one that seeks to achieve specific levels of learner performance on standardised tests, but one that plays a successful role in harnessing and implementing visions of community development.

This principle calls for the coming down of physical and metaphorical walls between the community and school. The principle frames the supposition - a mobilised community has a better chance of mobilising and sustaining a lively school. A lively school has the potential of seeding a lively community.

• Relationships Matter

Relationships - within a school, within a community, between a school and community, between a community, school and any 'outsider' - alt matter. The authenticity and fabric of these relationships determine the possibilities for co-creation. This principle calls on us to 'care about' the fibre of relationships within any school transformation process and to consider processes that focus on the fabric of relationships for change. It also provides a deep challenge to the complexity of establishing 'human relationships' across historically constructed differences in power.

The relationship between schools and communities on the one hand and 'development outsiders on the other is deeply rutted in either oppressive or patronizing patterns of relationships. There is often superficial friendliness on top of deep patterns of mistrust and unequal power relations There are stated rules of behaviour. People have largely learned their 'part'.

Finding ways outside of these pre-existing 'ruts' is important to establish more essentially human relationships of co-creation. This includes a commitment to truth telling. It impacts on seemingly 'small' choices such as staying in communities rather than nearby hotels during visits.

The principle that relationships matter is in some way related to ubuntu - where who we are is created through our relationships with others. It is a call for a deep humanness in interaction - joined by both the humility and possibilities of our shared crazy world.

Relationships of respect and trust take time to build