Services SETA’s real estate transformation drive graduates 537 youth:
A new generation of black property professionals officially stepped into the industry on Saturday as part of Services SETA’s ambitious drive to transform the real estate market in South Africa.
A total of 537 young people graduated as certified real estate practitioners at the Durban International Convention Centre, a ceremony that marked the completion of the KwaZulu-Natal Real Estate Training and Placement Programme.
The initiative is a partnership between Services SETA, the KwaZulu Natal Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs (EDTEA), the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority (PPRA) and industry partners.
Over the past 12 months, the graduates completed a professional journey that combined structured training, on-the-job experience, and industry examinations. They received certificates issued by the PPRA, South Africa’s statutory property regulator, as formal recognition of their compliance and readiness to serve as professionals in the real estate industry.
In terms of key industry valuations and trends, as of 2026, the combined value of residential and commercial property excedded R8,8 trillion, with the residential property market valued at roughly R6,9 trillion.
KZN EDTEA Musa Zondi said programmes such as the Real Estate Training and Placement Programme provided young people with market-relevant skills, practical industry exposure and pathways to sustainable careers.
“This milestone marks the beginning of their professional journey into the property sector,” he said, emphasising the need for such programmes to be spread across the country.
The Services SETA Acting Chief Executive Officer, Sibusiso Dhladhla, in his address, announced that the organisation graduated over 530 young people out of the 700 who enrolled in the programme, which is an achievement reflecting more than an 80% success rate.
“454 of the graduates received a 99% pass rate on PPRA exams and today they are recognised as professional real estate agents,” he said. Dhladhla further highlighted the importance of acknowledging real estate as a broad industry that plays a vital role in shaping the economy.
“The more we invest in the real estate industry and expand such programmes, the more we will change how this industry is perceived. It will move away from being seen as a light industry to becoming a recognisable sector,” Dhladhla said.
“Property will forever live. Government is moving into public properties, municipalities are reviving, and that requires professional agents”.
PPRA Board Chairperson, Queendy Gungubele, congratulated the graduates and noted that the milestone represents more than the completion of a training programme.
“This moment represents access to opportunity and the transformation of an industry that for many years did not reflect the diversity of talent in our country,” she said.
Anathi Gasa, one of the graduates, shared his journey in real estate industry, saying that he believes the sector holds untapped potential for South Africa’s economy.
“Post matriculating, I realised that I wanted to pursue a career that is more practical,” he said, referencing his early experience in sales.
“In high school, I used to sell t-shirt as a way of making income”.
For Gasa, the programme did not only offer personal growth, but an entry into an industry that is increasingly recognised as a driver of entrepreneurship and community upliftment.
“This programme was more practical and really developed my confidence of being an entrepreneur” .
He acknowledged that the industry demands discipline and foresight.
“Pursuing a career in real estate needs patience. It has a lot of money but also requires thinking and alignment of plans. This qualification is a key to better my living and also change the lives many, this is an industry that needs recognition,” Gasa said, adding that the real estate industry was evolving from a secondary career option into a cornerstone of economic transformation and opportunity.
The graduates will now enter the property sector as candidate property practitioners, supported through mentorship and industry guidance as they establish their careers.
A shared journey: Nurturing a nation of readers:
Following the release of the 2030 Reading Panel’s 2026 report, we find ourselves at a critical moment in our nation’s educational journey. We have spent many years seeking to understand how best to support our children, and today, we have a clearer picture than ever before. This moment calls not for despair, but for deep, collective resolve to nurture the immense potential that sits in every classroom across South Africa.
Thanks to the Department of Basic Education’s comprehensive Funda Uphumelele National Survey (FUNS), we now have a detailed understanding of foundational learning across all languages and provinces. The data serves as a vital compass. Currently, around 30% of our young learners in Grades 1 to 3 are reading at grade level in their home language. We also know that 81% of our Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language. Rather than viewing these numbers as an indictment, we must see them as a clear map showing us exactly where our children need our help and resources the most.
It’s important to remember that when a child cannot read for meaning by age ten, we are not simply confronting a school problem. We are shaping the boundaries of citizenship and opportunity. We are deciding, often without admitting it, who will participate fully in our democracy and economy, and who will remain on the margins of both.
Reading is not only an academic milestone, it is a form of national infrastructure. It determines whether a child can continue learning across subjects, whether they can navigate a world of forms, instructions, and information, and whether they can grow into an adult who can engage public debates, understand rights and responsibilities, and pursue opportunity with confidence. Early literacy is the gateway skill. It unlocks all the others.
The encouraging truth is that South Africa is not starting from zero. Over many years, government, provinces, educators, researchers, and partners have helped build a stronger understanding of “what works.” The task before us now is to align behind a shared, practical goal: ensuring that every child, in every community, experiences daily, high-quality reading instruction, supported by the simple inputs that make practice possible: structured lessons, print-rich classrooms, appropriate books, and sustained support for teachers.
This shared goal also clarifies shared responsibility. Government must provide clear strategic direction through a coherent, costed plan that aligns every level of the system behind the same outcomes, while continuing to set standards, invest in Grade R and the foundation phase, strengthen teacher development, and use national data to target support where it is needed most. Business and philanthropy can help close the resource gap by supporting the provision of graded readers, classroom libraries, and proven intervention models that make improvements stick. Civil society can support government to implement intervention models at scale, help ensure the development and provision of high-quality reading resources, mobilise after-school reading clubs and support community libraries. And parents and caregivers, often under immense pressure, can be recognised as essential partners, supported with practical guidance in home languages to build daily reading habits. If we want to defend and deepen South Africa’s nation-building project, we must put foundational learning at the centre. Every strategy we endorse, and every action we take, must start with that task.
Fortunately, there is hope to build upon. Six of our provinces – the Eastern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Northern Cape and the Western Cape – are beginning to roll out large-scale systemic reading interventions that will reach hundreds of thousands of children. These evidence-based models combine three non-negotiable elements: structured daily lessons, properly resourced classrooms, and intensive teacher support. The Department of Basic Education’s own Early Grade Reading Study, which tracked these approaches for more than a decade, proves that they work.
In the 2026 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared that “a strong economy relies on a well-educated, capable and skilled population.” His commitment to intensifying efforts on early literacy and numeracy, alongside the vital step of making Grade R compulsory, sets a positive direction for our nation. To bring this vision to life, we must ensure that our national investments flow toward these foundational years. Treating early literacy as the bedrock of our economic and social future is among the most impactful investments we can make.
However, the state cannot do this alone. The transformation we seek requires every South African. We need our corporate entities, philanthropic organisations, and civil society to walk alongside government, scaling up the evidence-based models that are already working and helping them reach the schools and communities that need them most.
We must also recognise, support, and empower parents, caregivers, and local communities. A child’s journey with words begins long before they enter a classroom; it begins at home, in the stories shared on a grandmother’s lap, in the songs of our heritage, and in the everyday encouragement of a community that values learning. When parents and schools work hand-in-hand, the impact on a child’s reading journey is boundless.
Education represents one of our largest public investments, but it is the human capital, the children entering Grade 1 this year that will ultimately determine our sustained growth as a country. We have the tools. We have promising provincial models. And we share a united, hopeful vision.
We owe it to our youth to provide them with the keys to opportunity. Let us walk this path together, turning our shared knowledge into action, and building a South Africa where every child can read for meaning.
Dr Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is the former Deputy President of South Africa (2005–2008) and former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women. She chairs the 2030 Reading Panel, an independent group of South African leaders working to address the country’s reading crisis. The Panel’s 2026 report was released on 24 February 2026.
Zimbabwe’s diaspora as sovereignty in exile: A conversation with Jacob Ngarivhume:
For more than three decades, the daily survival of most Zimbabweans has not been scripted by the state alone. It has been quietly underwritten by citizens scattered across the globe who remit billions of dollars back into the country each year. What was once condemned as betrayal, the mass departure of Zimbabweans in search of dignity, stability, and opportunity, has evolved into the nation’s most reliable system of economic and social support. Through remittances, professional networks, and civic resilience, the diaspora has become an unofficial architecture of governance: a transnational lifeline that sustains households, finances education and healthcare, and stabilises communities where public institutions have been hollowed out by corruption, policy failure, and political inertia. In recent op-eds published in the Mail & Guardian and NewsDay Zimbabwe, I argued that the ‘diaspora’ is more than an economic story; that it represents governance by other means, an improvised but powerful system of solidarity that substitutes for a retreating state.
These arguments sparked robust engagement across multiple platforms, including a thoughtful intervention from Jacob Ngarivhume, a Zimbabwean opposition politician, the founder of Transform Zimbabwe, who is known to have an interest in tackling corruption, economic collapse, and human rights issues. Ngarivhume proposed that we extend the discussion into a deeper exchange probing the contradictions at the heart of Zimbabwe’s diaspora politics: the paradox of remittance capture without political representation, the unrealised promise of diaspora investment instruments, the mechanics of global remittance systems, and the structural exclusion that continues to define governance in Zimbabwe. What follows is not a polite exchange but a necessary interrogation, an attempt to map the contours of Zimbabwe’s unofficial state of survival and to insist that the diaspora be recognised not merely as exiles sending money home, but as citizens whose ideas, resources, and political voice must help shape the nation’s future.
Question 1. Your article, The Diaspora Dividend, appeared in the Mail & Guardian in January. It’s subtitled ‘Zimbabwe’s Unofficial State of Survival’. What motivated you to write this article?
Read here: https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/opinion/2026-01-12-the-diaspora-dividend-zimbabwes-unofficial-state-of-survival/ and https://www.newsday.co.zw/opinion-analysis/article/200051146/the-economics-of-survival-diaspora-remittances-as-africas-lifeline
For years, Zimbabwe’s ruling elite treated migration with satire and disdain. Robert Mugabe and sections of ZANU-PF mocked migrants as “British Bum Cleaners” for taking low-status jobs abroad, portraying their departure as a betrayal of the national project. Yet history has produced a striking reversal. The diaspora, once ridiculed, now sustains Zimbabwe’s survival, remitting billions and supporting millions of households. What was framed as abandonment has become resilience. Beyond finance, the diaspora functions as governance by other means, funding education, healthcare, and community welfare, forming a transnational civic infrastructure that compensates for weakened state institutions.
Question 2. You suggest that migration from Zimbabwe has evolved into a parallel system of governance or ‘shadow state’. In what sense do you make this claim?
I use the term “shadow state” not in the conventional sense of a criminal power structure, but to describe a parallel architecture of survival operating beyond Zimbabwe’s formal institutions. As public systems have weakened over the past three decades through economic collapse and institutional erosion, the diaspora has steadily filled the vacuum. What began as household remittances has evolved into a broader ecosystem sustaining livelihoods, education, healthcare, and local infrastructure. Unlike predatory shadow states discussed in political science, this is a civic one, anchored in solidarity, kinship, and community networks, through which citizens abroad perform functions traditionally associated with the state, creating a resilient form of bottom-up, transnational governance.
Question 3. The term ‘shadow state’ usually refers to corrupt elites involved in criminal activities in collusion with foreign syndicates. How much of the Diaspora’s remittances are actually illicit funds being reinvested from gold and diamond smuggling?
Illicit financial flows exist, particularly in gold and diamond smuggling, but reducing Zimbabwe’s diaspora dividend to illicit capital is analytically misleading. The vast majority of remittances come from legitimate labour abroad, nurses in the United Kingdom, teachers across Southern Africa, engineers, entrepreneurs, and traders whose earnings sustain families and communities back home. The diaspora dividend must be understood within the broader political economy of migration, where mobility becomes a rational response to limited domestic opportunity. In effect, Zimbabwe has exported labour while importing resilience, as migrant wages and networks stabilise household economies, finance education and healthcare, and cushion communities against economic volatility.
Question 4. We see massive investment of remittances in private sector investment in homes and business property, but precious little public sector investment. Alongside impressive private homes, we find gutted roads, dilapidated schools and dysfunctional hospitals. Yet you also suggest that the Diaspora helps fund schools, clinics and infrastructure. What evidence supports this claim?
Remittances are often dismissed as private transfers used for homes, family support, or small businesses, but this view underestimates their broader developmental role. Across Zimbabwe, diaspora resources extend beyond households to finance schools, clinics, boreholes, and essential local infrastructure. Although these initiatives rarely pass through formal state channels or receive official recognition, they represent a steady stream of community-level investment where public provision has weakened. Organised through church networks, hometown associations, and community committees, diaspora contributions function as grassroots development finance, transforming dispersed migrant incomes into public goods and sustaining communities through transnational solidarity rather than formal state intervention.
Question 5. Do we have any data to show how much the Diaspora pours into various economic activities, or their impact on people’s livelihoods and the economy?
According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, diaspora remittances exceeded US$ 1.7 billion in 2024, making them one of the country’s most significant sources of foreign currency and a stabilising pillar of the economy. Yet the headline figure conceals a major analytical gap. Existing data captures the scale of inflows but offers little insight into how funds are allocated across consumption, education, healthcare, housing, or productive investment. What Zimbabwe lacks is a rigorous mapping of these financial flows. A comprehensive national study is urgently needed to trace how diaspora capital circulates through communities and contributes to development, household resilience, and broader economic stability.
Question 6. On the one hand, you accuse Zimbabwe’s repressive ruling elite, compromised by corruption and patronage, of the country’s economic mismanagement and decay. Yet, on the other hand, you expect the same Zimbabwe regime to implement the 2016 National Diaspora Policy. Is this realistic?
Expecting Zimbabwe’s political elite to fully implement the 2016 National Diaspora Policy is paradoxical. Governance structures often criticised for corruption and exclusion are unlikely to empower a constituency they frequently view with suspicion, one that is economically independent and politically vocal abroad. The diaspora thus occupies an uneasy position: indispensable as a source of foreign currency yet politically inconvenient because it lies beyond the state’s immediate control.
Nevertheless, dismissing the policy would be short-sighted. Even imperfect frameworks establish benchmarks for accountability and engagement, providing advocacy tools and institutional entry points through which diaspora organisations and civil society can pressure the state to recognise and integrate the diaspora into national development.
Question 7. The Government has consistently tried to capture remittances without granting voting rights to Zimbabweans living abroad. What should be done to change their policy?
This situation represents a fundamental contradiction in Zimbabwe’s governance framework. The state actively seeks to capture diaspora remittances while simultaneously denying the diaspora political representation. Such an arrangement reduces citizens abroad to economic instruments rather than political stakeholders. Addressing this injustice requires sustained advocacy from civil society, regional institutions, and diaspora organisations to link financial engagement with democratic rights. Diaspora enfranchisement must be non-negotiable.
Question 8. You mention that Ghana introduced Diaspora Bonds. What are diaspora bonds, how do they work, and who benefits from them?
Diaspora bonds represent an important instrument in development finance. These government-issued securities allow countries to mobilise diaspora savings for national infrastructure and development projects. Ghana and several other countries have successfully experimented with such instruments. When properly structured, diaspora bonds can create a mutually beneficial arrangement: governments gain access to long-term capital, while diaspora investors gain secure opportunities to contribute to national development.
Question 9. What are the main channels used by the Diaspora to remit funds to Zimbabwe? To what extent are they secure, efficient and affordable? How can they be improved?
Most diaspora remittances flow through formal financial channels, including banks, international money transfer operators such as Western Union, Mukuru, and WorldRemit, and increasingly digital and mobile money platforms. While these systems have improved efficiency and transparency, transaction fees remain relatively high, encouraging the persistence of informal channels. Improving affordability and security requires regulatory reform, competition among service providers, and technological innovation in digital finance.
Question 10. What is the main problem facing the Diaspora? What policy change is needed most to help the Diaspora?
The diaspora’s greatest challenge is structural exclusion. Zimbabweans abroad remain politically disenfranchised, lack secure investment channels, and are often viewed with suspicion by the state. The most urgent reform is therefore diaspora enfranchisement and integration into national development planning. Without political rights and institutional recognition, the diaspora will continue to be treated merely as a source of remittances rather than as citizens actively shaping Zimbabwe’s future.
Wellington Muzengeza is an Independent Journalist, Political Risk Analyst, and Urban Strategist, offering incisive insights into urban planning, infrastructure, leadership succession, and governance reform across Africa’s evolving post-liberation and urban landscapes.
Submit and get free exposure here: Showcase Your Business | Advertise Your Special Offers.
