From academic development to township enterprise, open to anyone willing to learn, lead, and contribute.
EEA's programmes span three pillars: academic learning, community outreach, and applied innovation. Some are running now. Some are in active development. All are open to people from any background.
Programme Status Key
Our most ambitious programme. We are developing a structured framework to establish enterprise clusters in township communities around Tshwane, grounded in the principle that economic participation must be learned, owned collectively, and governed sustainably. We aim to pilot the first cluster in 2025.
We visit Grade 12 learners at under-resourced schools in the communities around us. Our team, drawn from EEA members and ambassadors, delivers university application support, subject choice guidance, NSFAS information, and economic literacy sessions. We have already reached over 150 learners at two schools.
A free online learning platform that teaches any student to read, interpret and write about the South African economy. Foundations is eight modules — prices, inflation, the Reserve Bank, the rand, jobs, and the national budget — each with a quiz that explains every answer and an applied task where you write your own analysis. Finish it and you earn the EEA Foundations Certificate.
The Institute is where you learn; the Club is where members meet. Open to any student from any discipline, the Club runs regular in-person and online sessions on the week's economic news, guest sessions with people working in finance, policy and research, and beginner-friendly financial literacy workshops. No economics degree required — curiosity is the only prerequisite.
EEA is designing a national architecture, a replicable framework that allows any university to establish an EEA branch, operating under shared governance principles, the same constitution, and a connected national mission. We are currently documenting the branch framework and invite expressions of interest from students at other institutions.
CEP is not a charity project. It is a structured institutional design experiment grounded in New Institutional Economics, the academic field that studies how rules, norms, and organisations shape economic outcomes.
We are developing CEP to be something that communities own, not just something they receive. Every design choice reflects this commitment.
No cluster launches until its members have completed structured economic literacy training. Financial return is the outcome of capability, not the starting point.
Enterprise clusters are structured so that economic benefit is shared, not captured by individuals. Rotated leadership builds shared capability over time.
Community members are involved in designing the programmes that serve them. We bring frameworks; communities bring context, priorities, and lived knowledge.
We are positioning CEP as a B-BBEE SED-eligible programme, enabling corporate partners to fund community economic development as part of their transformation commitments.
EEA engages community members and informal entrepreneurs to co-identify a viable enterprise cluster type (e.g. barbering, food, tailoring).
Participants complete structured financial literacy, business fundamentals, and sector-specific training before any enterprise activity begins.
The enterprise cluster launches under a shared governance model, collective decision-making, rotated leadership, transparent financial management.
Successful clusters document their model, mentor new clusters, and feed learning back into the CEP framework for national replication.
Every programme needs people. Students, community members, partners, and volunteers, you are welcome here.