South Africa’s mammoth unemployment rate emphasises the need to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit in schools.
This forms the basis of the School Entrepreneur Movement created by Scooler. The company was formed to foster an entrepreneurial spirit at schools.
The purpose of the movement, central to company objectives, is to draw high school learners into an awareness of what entrepreneurship is about and to inspire them to shape their own futures by exploring an alternative to mainstream tertiary education.
As early as Grade 8, high school students are being called on to make monumental decisions about their future and careers, but as founder of Scooler, Leon Lategan points out: “We have found a serious lack of information available to students at school around the subject of entrepreneurship, resulting in very few of them exploring this avenue after school.”
One also has to consider SA’s extremely high unemployment rate of 5,98 million, the excessive drop-out rates at universities – in 2017 alone, after four years studying at university the completion rate was only 36%, and at schools 533 491 students dropped out before reaching Grade 12.
The prohibitive cost of tuition is also a cause for concern, where students can expect to pay no less than R120k for a three-year degree, excluding living expenses and accommodation, and the fact that more than 50% of students applying to get into university will not be accepted owing to limited space.
The R100k Scooler Clash was launched on Thursday 23 August, calling on all Grade 8 to 12 learners to enter for free and battle it out to win R100 000 for the best existing business/ money making initiative currently run by a student at school.
The winner will receive a R50 000 cash prize and R50 000 worth of mentoring, coaching, advertising and social media exposure for their business. All the submitted businesses will be profiled on the Scooler website, where friends, family and the Scooler community get to vote for whomever they believe to be the best entrepreneur running the best business at school. Four runner ups will each also receive R10 000 worth of coaching for their businesses.
