SD Card Project
Through our SD card project, learners get access to a wealth of educational digital resources such as educational videos in most academic subjects, educational apps, audio-books, e-books and previous exam papers. Lack of high-speed internet in the community and high data costs limit the access of learners in our community to all the opportunities the internet gives for learning. However, most of the high school learners, and the caregivers of primary school learners, have access to smartphones where SD cards can be used.
The Awarenet team has therefore - in cooperation with Rhodes University Community Engagement -created an unprecedented digital library of 400GB of carefully curated, open-source educational materials aligned to the South African curriculum. This comprehensive collection bridges a critical gap, as no other organisation has compiled such diverse, multilingual resources tailored to South African learners.
These resources have been categorised according to age, grade and academic choices and loaded onto 64GB SD cards for direct use in learners' existing devices. A grade 3 learner therefore gets an entirely different package to a grade 11 learner in the mathematics and science stream or a grade 12 learner with the electives of history and geography.
As of the beginning of 2025 this project has reached more than 700 high school learners and the families of 150 primary school learners.
The families of the primary school learners also receive regular follow-up sessions and assistance from our staff and staff from partner organisation Lebone Centre in how to use the SD cards constructively for the learning journey of their children. Key for the primary school learners is that they get interested in reading at an early stage; hence the SD cards geared towards this age group is packed with child-friendly and fun reading materials.
The high school learners - particularly the ones in grades close to matriculation such as grades 11 and 12 - have often found the SD cards in terms of finding supporting material for their exam studies.
Hence we can say that this project contributes to every learner having a digital library in their pocket!
