Dr. Taddy Blecher
Brilliant Minds and Happy Hearts: South Africa’s First Free Universities
Dr Taddy Blecher - Brilliant Minds and Happy Hearts: South Africa’s First Free Universities
- Dr. Taddy Blecher is the CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association, CIDA, as we know it.
Yeah.
And the Maharishi Institute, which facilitates university education from unemployed youth from 11 countries in Africa. He also founded the Imvula Education Empowerment Fund and with the Rockefeller Foundation started the Impact Sourcing Academy and Invincible Outsourcing, which provides theoretical and practical training in the business process, outsourcing sector to unemployed youth, therefore bringing them into the economy. Dr. Blecher is also the creator of the E three initiative, entrepreneurship, employment ability, education for the National Department of Basic Education in South Africa. As a direct result of these works, over nearly 20,000 South Africans have been educated post-secondary school, found employment and moved out of poverty into a more successful life. Today, we are so lucky to have Taddy here with us talking about brilliant minds and happy hearts, how to achieve the future of human potential in Southern Africa. And I can tell you from my own experience, I visited the institute last year and had my own incredible experience there. So thank you, Taddy, for being here in New York with us today and for sharing your life’s journey. Going to hand over to you, thank you.
Thank you, Wendy. It was fantastic actually to meet you last year when you came to visit us and I think within about five minutes of you being there, I gave you a microphone to stand up and talk in front of hundreds of students, which you very gracefully did. And I think you ended up keeping them enthralled for about 45 minutes about your visions and dreams and the incredible work you do in art and in other areas. And you said to our students that when any of them are next in New York, they should please look you up. So, I hope that has happened by now. Anyway, it’s an absolute honour and privilege to be on the Lockdown University with people all over the world and probably a lot of South Africans. And so very, very exciting. So Maharishi Invincibility Institute, I’m going to be talking about, we like to say that we focus on offering world-leading education for all. And I think that the for all part is what we really focus on. And I think how we really differentiate ourselves from many of the thousands of organisations in South Africa and Southern Africa that work with youth to try get them into jobs is there’s probably two types of organisations. There’s those that will get youth into, like, complex software jobs, et cetera, but they will literally take, out of 500 people who apply, they will take one, two, maybe maximum 10. And then there’s those organisations that take youth into very low level entry level jobs where often you’re going to stay part of the working poor for the rest of your life, just surviving. And then they will be much more open access.
And I think what we focus on, which I suppose is unique about what we do, is we really take that 99% of people, the most marginalised youth, but prepare them for very, very top level jobs. And we’ve had a lot of success with that and it’s been an incredible journey for me for the last 28 years, which I’ll share more about. And we’ve now just got over the 20,000 mark, just nearly 21,000, we’ve placed into very high quality jobs. So, Steve Jobs had this saying that you have to have courage to follow your heart and intuition and everything else really is secondary to that. And we are here to put a dent in the universe. And I think growing up in South Africa, so many of us, I think, you know, we just are so passionate about our country and wanting to see how it can realise its full potential. And I think achieving impact isn’t easy. It’s, it comes from embracing hard problems. And I think we fell in love with this very hard, very tricky problem of could we help, you know, these millions of unemployed youth in South Africa ultimately get educated at a very high quality education and get them into top jobs, but take people who can’t get into university ‘cause their marks are not good enough. And also coming from families with no money. So as we know, of course, there’s millions of South African youth who grow up without parents and millions of these youth are unemployed and they live in some kind of twilight economy. And that’s really the youth we are trying to work with. So, just for myself, as a picture of my family and my beautiful mom and the four boys, we grew up sleeping on the floor together on foam mattresses. And our family started off pretty poor, but education was like a religion in our family. There’s my little sister as well.
And so, even though we didn’t have much money to spare, all the money went into providing private school education and we all went to King David Victory Park. It was an amazing schooling. I went all the way through to grade 12 or went to Wits University. And between all of us on the screen, yeah, I think we’ve got 34 degrees. And my dad was also very, very well educated gynaecologist, obstetrician, some people might have known him. And so, I saw firsthand that even though we grew up sleeping on the floor, it was actually education that changed everything and our family became super successful. And I myself became an actuary and I got four degrees later on, I got two honorary doctorates, and I was very fortunate to be the top actual honours student in South Africa. And I won the Liberty gold medal and I had lots of money. I was young and I could do whatever I wanted. And then what ended up happening is I was offered some wonderful jobs, actually, one in New York, another one in the US, and two in Australia and two New Zealand, so, like, yeah, I just started to plan to leave South Africa and this was 1995. I was 27 years old and Mandela obviously came into power in 1994. And I think many, many of us were all wondering what would happen in the future of the country at the seminal moment. So I bought my air ticket, I packed up all of my stuff, and I resigned from my job. I was working for a top global consulting firm at that time in strategy. And I was ready to go off. And then literally, two weeks before leaving, I had this huge change of heart. I’d been feeling pretty sick about this thought of leaving South Africa for about six weeks.
I was the only one left actually in Johannesburg, even though we all grew up with my mom there. And so, I would be leaving and my mom would remain and then just ended up staying up all night this two weeks before. And then, I was quite emotional and I, you know, it’s one of those nights when you cannot sleep where you just want to knock yourself out. And anyway, in the morning I went to go see my mother, I’d been crying and I said to her, “Mom, I’m not going to go, I’m going to stay in South Africa. I believe in education as a way to change the future of the country. Everyone can vote now, but so what if you can vote if you can’t educate your children and especially at higher education levels and you can’t, you know, as a result, get decent jobs, you’re never going to have proper housing, or healthcare, or food, or anything else. And I’d like to give this a shot. And so, just ended up working in Alex Township for four and a half years in schools. It was a very, very fascinating time, but the most important thing from that time when we worked with about 9,000 school kids is that I just fell in love with the potential of these young people. These are some of the most brave, extraordinary, resilient, incredible young people that you could almost find anywhere in the world, but they don’t have opportunities. And so, after we helped thousands of kids get through metric and dramatically improve their marks and then end up on the streets, this idea came one day, could we, I was literally in the shower. What about we start the first free university in the country?
And this was, of course, more than 20 years before fees must fall movement. And before the South African government started to make some free tertiary education available. And so, of course, we had nothing, we had no money, or buildings, or books, or computers, no teachers, no accreditation, nothing that you need to start a university. I only knew what wits looked like and UCT and in those days it was Rand Afrikaans University, now University of Johannesburg. But we got this idea and we ended up sending out a note to 350 schools. We didn’t even have an address that people could apply to. We just had a fax number from my old company where I worked, which had given me an office. And so, we literally kind of started the first free university in the country from a fax machine, and then 350 students arrived. We lost a hundred of them in one day. This was, we managed to get in downtown Joburg, a very, very dear friend of mine and a mentor. He had a building, it was pretty derelict, it really was not a very pleasant place, but it was amazing because we could start the first free university in the country and we still had absolutely nothing. And it became a urban legend in South Africa, how we ended up starting to teach our students on photostat copies of computers 'cause we didn’t have any computers and that’s how they learned to type. And every day we would sing Bob Marley, redemption song, emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds, and the students would have to type on this piece of paper and time.
And then when we got our first computers donated, 90% of the students could type at 30 words a minute, which is really a very competent level of typing and were very accurate. And that was like a first of a million revelations that we’ve had around that education really is about hearts and minds of people. How do you unlock and unfold the inner potential that is latent and often even the individual cannot see? And how do you actually unfold this? And if you can get that right, if we can wake up young people and help them find their life purpose and fall in love with life, then everything will change for this individual. And they’ll start to want to learn and they’ll start to want to learn about everything and especially the things that are going to make a better life for them. So starting on a Xerox copy of a computer keyboard, and we started with this vision that we wanted to change the future of South Africa through unleashing the infinite potential of our youth. Now South Africa is a very young nation. It’s a nation where if you do really want to change things, the right place actually is to start with youth because that’s the majority of the population. And these youth, as I say, you know, millions of them not growing up with a loving guidance of two parents or in a stable kind of situation and ending up just hustling. And this becomes very, very challenging for them. And many of these youth grow up with a lot of anxiety, tremendous fear, depression, even anger can grow.
And so, like, just living like this kind of hustling, it really takes its toll on these young people. And so, we wanted to give this kind of opportunity as if we were almost like, you know, like this magic wand out of the sky to help a young person completely change their future. And we set this goal of educating a hundred thousand leaders. Leadership is so important. And just mentioning Mandela, and I was very fortunate to sit with Mandela for about two and a half hours on two occasions, like, right at his elbow and talking to him. And it was deep and profound and touching and life changing, having those absolutely heartfelt conversations with him and sharing with him what our dream was in education. And that was an example of such a great servant leader, somebody who just put everybody else first and that’s what he cared about. And we’ve seen the opposite of that in South Africa and it’s truly sad. The pits to which of hell to which our leadership has sunk, you know, amongst presidents in our country and just absolute lack of care for the people. And so, so leadership is very, very important. And in my view, we need a whole new generation of leaders in South Africa and in Southern Africa who are just going to take the subcontinent forward. And it’s the same in Zimbabwe. I mean, we desperately need young leaders for Zimbabwe, for Swaziland, for every one of these countries. And particularly in South Africa, it’s desperately needed new fresh blood. So, I’ll just share a short video that we made. We actually made this video in 2016. The reason I want to show this video is because we do something that most people think is impossible, that we take young people who, which I’ll share are largely illiterate and enumerate.
And then we prepare them for these very high level jobs, which people think is not possible. And we approached Accenture, which is one of the top consulting firms in 2014, and asked if they would employ any of our graduates. And they were like, absolutely not. Like, you know, we take the top 10 from Wits University, the top 10 from the University of Cape Town, we would never even look at these individuals and most of them don’t even have a decent metric. If they’re lucky enough to have metric, they don’t have a degree pass out of metric, et cetera. And I won’t tell the whole story 'cause of time, but a year, it took us a year and Accenture even did, they hired Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr who did a hundred page legal review on us and said, we’re legit and they recommend that we, they do hire these students. The whole thing kept getting blocked and the students had to go for more psychometric tests and so on and so on. But in the end from when Accenture was saying they couldn’t take a single one of our students, they ended up taking all nine. And this is what you’re going to see in this video, is this first graduation where we told these nine students and their parents and guardians that they had now a job at Accenture. And of course, they’re going to go into jobs earning hundreds of thousands a year. And in the January, Accenture contacted us and say, "Well, do you have any more? Because the students from other institutions don’t have the same passion, and courage, and resilience, and everything else.
And we said, "We just so happened to have a whole lot of them.” And they ended up taking 17 out of their 20 places in that January came from the Maharishi Institute and the next year they had 34 places and all 34 came from us. And now they have actually employed over 200 of our graduates, which is a total coup, including people who were garden boys and people working, picking flowers in the fields in the most manual labour that you can ever possibly get. So, just take a look at this video and you’ll just get a sense of what we do.
Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world. The education system of our country is in a critical condition. The unemployment rate is the highest it has ever been. One particular educational institution is revolutionising the education system and delivering graduates that prove just that. We as Manmade Media were given an opportunity to explore the relationship between these graduates and their employers. What we discovered was astounding. Take a look.
Meeting the students, their attitude stands out.
The Maharishi Institute students that we dealt with, I thought were very confident, they knew exactly what they wanted.
They look at things differently, they ask questions, they’re not your status quo kind of thing.
The rocket shooting straight up, that’s how I’m learning right now. I’m climbing a mountain.
MI has opened new doors for me as now I’m working in Accenture at Global Company.
Well, five years time, I see myself escalating that corporate ladder.
What’s most impressive about MI is not that it’s free, it is a world-class education provided to a student who would never have had the opportunity to get out of this situation, let alone become a business graduate. Corporate South Africa is waking up to the rising light of Maharishi. Let’s hear what Marc, the CEO of JP Morgan had to say.
If you look at some of the outputs from the existing work that we’ve done to together and historically with Maharishi, you have an over 95% success rate. And crucially, you have a very high percentage that maintain, if you will, employment beyond the initial placement.
In 2014, our youth unemployment rate was at an unbelievable 75%. That means that South Africa has the third highest youth unemployment rating in the world. And with 1 million vacant positions due to lack of skills, we are in desperate need of institutions like Maharishi.
Youth Unemployment and addressing that, it’s a huge issue in South Africa. And so, the work that we do through Maharishi and the other programmes that we support, ultimately we hope will create sustainable employment for youth. And ultimately that in turn will help create a more socially inclusive and cohesive South Africa.
If we look at our recruitment from MI consists of two components. The one is the work study students and the other is students that we bring into the internship programme. 2016, we actually committed to recruiting 34 interns from the Maharishi Institute.
A hundred percent of our graduate positions in the company are folded by MI graduates. Genpact will certainly consider recruiting more MI graduates in the future. In fact, we should be in discussions right now to get the next batch through to our organisation.
One of the managers actually mentioned this, these were the business sources we’ve had in a long time.
These students have really showed that MI is doing a great job and the foundation is there in terms of them delivering value to the client and committing themselves when they come into this environments.
So, I think their philosophy and the approach towards education really sit in a part other universities, and I think we can see that in the graduates and beliefs.
Graduates from the Maharishi Institute are different. They’re go-getters, they’re special, they change makers, the leaders of the future. These are committed individuals who truly value the position that we are giving them at Accenture.
Positive attitude and never saying no for a task, never saying I can’t do this, that believe that they have, that all things are possible kind of thing. And going there extra mile. There’s this principle, initial of life is too good, so you dare to grow.
Because I’ve learned to excel, do my best, to do it right the first time every time.
We think Maharishi is best in class in terms of how it operates and the impact it has.
Be aligned to the Accenture core values, which is good.
And my hair has given me that opportunity. And here I am, I’ve got my PA degree and I see my future as bright as I always wish to.
When you meet students who deliver at the calibre that they’re delivering, it makes you want to raise your bar as well as a leader.
So these are these incredible youth that we have the privilege to work with every day. And I love that story because they went from not being prepared to take any of our students to now, as I say, they’ve hired over 200 people in Accenture and we are very, very proud of where our graduates have ended up in Deloitte, McKinsey, working in all the software companies, just, I mean all across the economy in South Africa, huge numbers in the banks, et cetera. So it was a photo my wife took, Annie, when we were just getting going, this was down in Caliche and Cape Town. Kids just jumping on tyres. And we had this vision, could we get kids to get through high quality schooling where we could create our own high school, get them into college, university, and these industry specialisations in these very, you know, critical and precious jobs. And then into the economy into those types of jobs. And that’s how we started. And so now, really, we can go from kids of 18 months old, all the way through and we provide a whole number of different educational opportunities. We’ve got 45 national accreditations, we offer access to 80 industry qualifications, globally recognised certifications, et cetera. We do it, of course, we know it’s the most unequal country, but it doesn’t have to be. And that’s what we really set out to prove is that the people on the right-hand side of this picture, actually have extraordinary potential, just like the people on the left-hand side of this picture. And if we could develop the potential, then everything would change. And really I’ve realised that this is my life purpose, is helping young people realise their potential and doing it in a way so that people realise anything is possible. And it’s kind of mind blowing.
And we know, of course, South Africa’s filled with angry youth who are unemployed, over 7,000 social uprisings every year against municipalities, service delivery, et cetera. But the thing about this picture is not that people are protesting, the thing about it is that everybody in this picture has been to school. Everyone went to grade one, grade two, grade three. It just didn’t help them. And so, when we set out to create this kind of, you know, very innovative approach to education, we really thought, what is it that people truly need? What are all the things that they need, so that they really will find a sustainable home in the economy and that people will really want to employ them and they’ll have long-term sustainable jobs. So, in a picture, that’s what we had to do. The economy’s getting tougher. There’s more and more AI and machine learning. All this type of thing where technology will take away more and more and more jobs. And here young people come out like these dwarves, almost out of the high school system, and especially the kids that we’re taking, and we’ve got to close this huge gap. And most people would say it’s not possible to close that gap, so that was the experiment we set out to test. So 70% of our students are women. We keep a small number of spots for students from 17 African countries. These are generally asylum seekers, refugees, you know, these car guards that on the side of the road. The person came from Burundi, South Sudan, Congo. They can’t get a job, they can’t get a bank account, they can’t go to university, they can’t do anything.
And so, we want to also try help youth like that. And we think it’s very important to break down xenophobia and for our young people to create warm friendships with people all across the continent for business, for trade, et cetera. And 99% of these youth are unemployed. And then they come in and they only have to pay 200 rand a month, which I’ll talk about later if there’s time. Here’s an example of a young guy. I love to talk about the story because he phoned me six years ago on Christmas day. It was the 25th of December. And I never normally answer my phone if I don’t recognise the number. And he said, “Sir, my name is Nhlakanipho Chiliza.” He said, “I’m phoning you on Christmas day to tell you that you saved my life.” And I said, “Nhlakanipho, tell me, tell me your story.” He said, “I’m from a family of 13 people, 13 children. We were brought up by my grandmother on an 1800 rand a month pension in rural KZN. I finished high school, couldn’t get a job. After a year, I became totally despondent. I became a gardener, I became on the part-time, became a part-time taxi driver’s assistant, just lining people up for the taxi ranks, taking their money, et cetera.” He said, “Me and the other guys in the taxi rank,” he said, “we earn 20 round a day.”
He said, “I earned 500 a month, 6,000 rand a year.” And he said that for a year he resisted these guys, every night they would go after work and sniff glue and buy methylated spirits and eat, pour it on white bread and get stoned out of their minds. And he said, and then after a year he started doing this, and he said after one year of doing this, all he wanted to do was kill himself. And he was up somebody’s gutter one day on their roof of a double story house up a ladder. And all of a sudden his old school principal came running down the road and said, Nhlakanipho, you’re not going to believe this. You’ve been awarded a bursary in Johannesburg. I’m going to send you there. And he put me on a taxi and he sent me to Joburg. He said, I had 20 rand in my pocket, I had two T-shirts, two pairs of jeans. And he said, you took me in arranged accommodation, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, I want to tell you my story. And when a guy like Nhlakanipho comes in, now, when I say at traditional university, if we all think of Harvard University, or Oxford University in England, or Cambridge University, or MIT, any of these greatest universities in the world, they do what I would call genius ingenious art. You don’t get into one of those universities if you didn’t get straight A’s right through school. If you’re not an absolutely, you know, 0.1% of your population of your country, you don’t get in. So you come in as a genius and of course these are great institutions, but you still come out as a genius. But not that much has really actually happened.
What we set out to do is we said, could we create a university where we would take people that cannot get into university because their marks are so bad. In fact, if your marks are really good, you can’t come to us. And so, we’re taking people who’ve just scraped through metric or didn’t even pass metric. And you can see here on a nationwide standardised test, when we test them coming in, 95% of them are actually at primary school level. That is how bad our public school system is, which is shameful to say. And even now, I mean there’s some minor improvement, but it’s really very poor. And so, imagine a person coming in who’s passed him a trick, but they write like a grade one, and you can see, like, 15 people here, and maths at like a grade three level, no university could ever work with people like that. Now not only are they weak educationally, our youth, as I say, they’re dealing with tremendous trauma. They’re growing up in these very, very broken homes in many, many cases and they’ve been exposed to tremendous violence. We know the levels of violence against women and children in South Africa. It’s not like that doesn’t affect people. It deeply affects people. And this is a test that we started doing six years ago. It is the same test that the US military actually do on war veterans who come back from Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria who fought in the war. And a very interesting statistic you may not know is that 10 times more US soldiers end up dying back in the US than died in the war. Why do they die?
They die because of this thing called post-traumatic stress disorder. And so, you can see how shocked we were when we found, and these are born free, that they weren’t born even during Apartheid, these young people we are working with. 36% have post-traumatic stress disorder as if they had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. Can you imagine that? 30% on the PTSD scale, 40% with chronic depression. So, these young people, they don’t want to get up in the morning. There’s nothing to live for. Nobody wants them, there’s nothing for them to do. Now we have to change that. We’ve got to completely change that mindset and we do it through a very, very innovative curriculum. And we call this curriculum consciousness-based education. It’s about dealing with a whole human being. It’s about the hearts and minds of that human being. And so, for example, an important thing we start off with for our students is a journey that we take them on. We have a piece of land, a nature reserve campus, and we take them away for two weeks where from six o'clock in the morning to one o'clock at night, beautifully facilitated programme, they start to think about all the people who’ve hurt them in their lives and forgiveness and how to start to craft a path of a different life and what their life purpose might be. We take them through a whole series of courses, including teaching them to meditate, which is something that I have found absolutely game changing not only in my own life, but now with over 30,000 students that we’ve trained either at school level or at higher education level.
We use a lot of software in our teaching, so that it’s adaptive learning, so students can go at their own pace because not everybody’s weak in maths in the same way. And if you just put them in a class of 30 people, then they just going to get lost again. And so, we have to really pinpoint where people are very weak and then strengthen them. So we’ve built this really very beautiful curriculum. It starts at eight o'clock in the morning every day, and it goes till six o'clock at night. And we are teaching the students discipline, we are teaching them professionalism, but the whole thing is ultimately about love and caring. And for a young person who doesn’t believe in themself, who’s got very low self-confidence, you know, when an adult comes along and shows them respect and shows them caring and gives them the time of day and they’re in a place where they can be themselves and express themselves and their views matter and so on, everything starts to change. And we actually got this idea, in fact, because we had no money in the beginning that we should have the students run the university. So we’re one of the only institutions that we know of in the world where 80% of the staff are our own students and graduates. So everything in the institution, basically, is run by students. In this way, they have a place, they have a belonging, they own the institution. So when you walk around the Maharishi Institute, and Wendy, you saw it that day, there is no litter around, there’s no graffiti on the walls, nobody’s writing on the desks, people are not destroying things.
We don’t have those issues. We don’t have those issues at all. And this is this respect, this ownership, this caring, the values that we impart. So what makes this different is it’s not just a degree, it’s a degree… We don’t think a degree is almost enough anymore because the economy is so tough, people have to specialise in industry areas like software development or cybersecurity. There’s about 4 million jobs vacant in the world in cybersecurity. Things like insurance or banking and so on. And then we write these global exams over and above, all the students get work experience, all the students get the experience of starting their own businesses because entrepreneurship is about practical experience. It’s not theoretical, it’s about practically getting engaged. And not everyone’s an entrepreneur of course, but some people are entrepreneurs and it’s helping those young people who entrepreneurs start to unleash that fire in them alongside giving them precious and scarce skills where they can later build businesses, so we partner with a Johannesburg Stock Exchange and we train stockbrokers. People can go into investment banking. We’ve put close to a thousand young people into the financial markets. They’re all across in equities, derivatives, all this type of thing. We’ve got this incredible cybersecurity academy with Absa that’s won two global awards now as the best cybersecurity programme nonprofit in the world.
We have an extraordinary programme with Bryte Insurance Company in the short term space where they’ve pledged to employ a thousand of our graduates. Already they’ve taken over 200 and on and on like that. Getting these youth into these precious jobs. So I thought because they couldn’t come into this actual Lockdown University talk, I thought, let me just share some photos as I tell you more about the institution. So you can see the students every day going about their business and their diligent business to build their lives, to lead and run this university. This is high school kids. High school starts at grade eight, it goes to grade 12, and then free passage into university. High school is free, university, you have to find 200 rand a month, so there’s some sense of commitment. We use something called the block system where we teach one subject at a time. Those students, you’re just seeing on the screen there, by the way, and I’ll just quickly show, every one of these students, by the way, is funded by your family, Wendy, so the Koch family. Every single young person in that group, in our foundation programme, and the hundreds of students that your family are supporting. But here you can see the students just going about their days. That’s one of our students who came from Bushbuckridge, could hardly speak English. He’s now head of education in the academic field. So, so many of these young people have gone on to do master’s degrees.
This is our preschool, our wonderful chef, Anthony. And so, you can just see there’s a very harmonious environment on campus and students love being there. It’s a very, very supportive place, very entrepreneurial. People can try anything, do anything, create their own. If they want to golf club, if they want to start something in any sport, any cultural activity, et cetera. It is fun, we have so much fun every day with the students. It’s really a blast and it’s obviously a massive amount of work, but it is a place where everybody contributes a little bit like a kibbutz, I suppose. The early day kibbutz is in Israel where if you were good at cooking you would cook, but then you get to eat yourself and you get to have your education basically for free. And so, in this way, it’s a place where everybody’s serving and everybody is gaining. And the great thing about that is it reduces cost about 40% in the institution. There’s an award-winning choir. We’ve got, our mass choir has about 230 people in. That was Tubby there who used to be the head of equities trading at Investec. We started our own stockbroking trading business. We’ve got about 10 businesses in the university and this is one of the ways we generate an income for the institution. So those are just some of the photos just to give you a sense of what life is like on campus every day.
And those were students in the Johannesburg campus. But I mentioned about post-traumatic stress disorder and I’m very thrilled to say it’s hard to get rid of PTSD. I don’t know if there’s any psychologists on the call, but people know that PTSD is not a fun thing and it can take 10 years of psychotherapy. It’s a published study in a British journal called Psychology Reports on our students compared to the students at University of Johannesburg. And you can see every single one of the students here with PTSD within 60 days is off this PCL scale. They no longer are considered to have PTSD, no longer have chronic depression because of daily meditation and all these programmes for healing and development where students in a conventional educational approach, no change even after first year, second year, third year, in fact, depression goes up slightly. So I told you about that young guy who phoned me and said, “sir, you saved my life.” And who had been on drugs in, on this taxi rank earning 6,000 rand a year, Here is a picture of him today. He works at Absa Investment Bank in Santon. He’s a director. He earns two and a half million rand a year, so he is gone from 6,000 to two and a half million and just so proud of him. You cannot imagine. So I said to him, “Nhlakanipho, let’s track how many of our graduates are working at Absa.” And we found over 400 and we found over 50 in management and senior management positions. And everyone on this slide here earns a million rand plus salary, but yet these individuals could never have gone into a conventional university. So there’s so many examples I could give.
We were the first African student ever to win the Cisco Global Networking competition. So overall, where are we up to? And as mentioned, we’ve now educated over 22,000 students. We’ve placed just close to 21,000 in jobs. What I’m very excited about is that in South Africa today, most people, if they’re lucky enough, get an internship and that’s just for one year. And I’m very proud to say that, firstly, we’ve had a 95% job placement rates since inception. So that means that every year the vast majority of our graduates are getting employed in quality jobs and we help find many of these jobs for them. But the more important statistic is that 90% of them are being converted at the end of that one year internship into a long-term or permanent job. And that is the moment everything changes for their family and for their future. They will have a completely fundamentally different life because of the power of education, and a good job, and a good salary, and a good opportunity. 5,000 of our students have become entrepreneurs with Sir Richard Branson. We started something called the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship. And that’s actually an old figure. It’s up to about 59 billion rand, the estimated combined salaries that our graduates will earn over their working careers. Working wherever they are, in stockbroking, in technology, in engineering, whatever it is across their working careers. We never have set out to win any awards.
We’ve been very, very blessed that we’ve won 34 awards. 13 of them are global awards. But one of the ones that has been most exciting for us and game changing for us is that Stanford spent two years writing this book where they looked across the world to find the most innovative universities in the world and somehow they heard about us and we don’t know how. And so, then started a process, which took about a year, and they ended up choosing us as one of the 12 most innovative education programmes in the entire world. They only chose two in Africa, in the whole of Africa, so this was thrilling. And this is a free book online if anyone wants to read it, called “A Guide to Reimagining Higher Education” by 2025. So that’s been a game changer. So how did we go starting a university from a photostat and a fax machine to actually having real buildings? And this first building was donated to us by Anglo-American. And I cannot speak enough of my love for Anglo-American. What a great, great, great company and the things that they’ve done. This is a 11,000 square metre building in downtown Johannesburg opposite the Magistrate’s Court. And actually, we can fit 1100 students in this building. We’ve actually currently got 1500 people in the building. So we were really running out of space. And then our founding donor, a gentleman called Duncan Saville, helped us to buy this building just down the road, the Saville Foundation.
And this is where we started our preschool and the university college. But the big breaking news that really, really is exciting, it’s just the best thing that’s ever happened in my career of doing this work is that on the 4th of August this year, just nearly two months ago, an opportunity of a lifetime, Anglo-American had moved out of the city to Rosebank and they were working out how to repurpose their head office. And this, of course, Wendy is very, very close to where your father used to work for. Years and years and years close to his office in Joburg City Centre in the CBD. This is one of the most iconic buildings in South Africa. The value of this donation that Anglo’s given us is over 200 million rand. This building can fit three and a half thousand students. It’s 42,000 square metres. It’s an entire city block with a closed off street in front of it. It is literally, I’ve been very fortunate, we won a $1 million prize some years ago from the Skoll Foundation. And so, I’ve been getting to go to Oxford University every single year. I tell you, this looks like Oxford University. It is magnificent since sandstone, five star, A grade. For us to be able take kids from the informal settlements and the townships and the slums and to give them an education world-leading five star in facility like this, it is just a game changer of note. I won’t show that video. And so, now that we’ve got three buildings in downtown Joburg and just bless Anglo-American for doing that, and we’ve now decided that really with so many of the big businesses having moved out of the city and obviously nature fulls a vacuum and could be filled with really bad things, which we’ve seen obviously in Hillbrow and Yeoville and Berea and so on. We need to protect the city.
And so, we’re creating what we’re calling Education Town and we’re now putting up huge billboards on our side of town saying Welcome to Education Town. And our goal eventually is to get 20, 30, 40,000 young people into this education town on the streets, changing their lives, becoming our future software developers, and network engineers, and banking specialists, and all these specialist skills, but coming from all of our townships and settlements all the way around. So Anglo’s been in the city for 105 years, we’ve now been there for 23 years. I’ve been doing this work for 28 years. Why it’s so great to do this in the city is 'cause it’s the cheapest place to get. Everybody has to travel through the city on taxis, buses or trains in order if they want to get, go to jobs in Rosebank, or Santon, or Midrand, or Pretoria. So the best and cheapest place we can be is in the centre of the city. And there’s been no meaningful educational presence. so we are very excited about doing this. There’s no great city in the world. I mean if you think of New York, Paris, London, anywhere that doesn’t have great educational institutions in the heart of the city, that’s what we are wanting to do for hundreds of years to create this city of hope, of education, of light, of entrepreneurship, of opportunity for everybody. And this was a very competitive process.
Anglo did not just give us this building. In fact, we weren’t allowed to be part of the process for the first six months. They only allowed 10 of the biggest organisations in South Africa. The biggest universities, the biggest, these are public universities, the biggest property developers in the country, et cetera. They had four offers of over a hundred million rand from this, for this building. And I’m just thrilled to say that in the end they decided to give it to us for 2.30. And here is the invoice they sent me, as you can see on the 25th of April, 2023, I got this, I always start working at about four or five in the morning and I thought I was tired and I was like rubbing my eyes and I was like trying to see this. And it’s like two rand plus that. So it’s one rand for the building, this 42,000 square metre building, one rand for the 20 million rand is worth of furniture they’ve given us, plus VAT at 15 cents each. So for 2.30, Anglo gave us… So I phoned them up, I said to Anton, this guy that we work with at Anglo, I said, “Do we really have to pay this? I mean, is this a joke?” He said, “No, you have to pay it or we’ll take the building back.” So, of course on our Nedbank online banking app paid 2.30 and we are now the proud owners of that incredible building. But something wonderful has started to happen around the city and this coalition of people, I think, Robbie Brozin of Nando’s talks about it that he says the visible people are invisible in the city. You can’t see them.
So the cops and the municipality and the people who should be cleaning the streets, et cetera, they’re invisible. But there’s these invisible people who working in the background and there are some wonderful NGOs and incredible organisations doing amazing work. And we’ve been working there for decades in the city and now people are seeing this and coming to support. So Anglo moving out, they’ve said, we are going to protect the future of the city. And we’ve created a coalition called Josie Ma Josie, Wits is involved, Standard Bank, Nando’s Absa. There’s just this whole coalition in the Maharishi Invincible Institute. So, what we’re doing as part of this coalition is firstly, we are going to start a security academy and we are going to have peace ambassadors across the streets of Johannesburg. And these individuals will be trained every day in Jujutsu. We’re doing this in partnership with CAP who one of the top security companies in South Africa. And we are going to create safety in the city because when they turn New York around, they had a visible security presence. We are putting solar street lights because without light at night, it is a terrifying place with all the load shedding. So we’re lighting up a whole of the streets with solar streetlights. We’re doing this again together with Anglo. And we’ve had our students starting to clean the streets. And so, our prediction is that in three to five years time, Joburg, CBD will have become an education town. It will be completely different to what people think of it and it will become one of the safest places in the country. Whereas currently people are terrified to go to Joburg.
So, we also have started in Cape Town, thanks to Absa. We have a nature reserve campus, which is very beautiful with about 4,000 animals where we take the students. We are now just in the process of buying an incredibly beautiful piece of land, it’s a golf course. And a very wealthy family that have been supporting our work for about 15 years. They said they would like to start a new university campus with us and they would support it, which is unbelievable. And we are doing this down in KwaZulu-Natal where there’s been riots and flooding. And in fact 80% of our students down there, their houses were washed away in that massive flooding. It’s been so much xenophobic violence. So we are so excited to bring this to KwaZulu-Natal and do something meaningful there. We’ve also started in Zimbabwe in an old military barracks. We pay about 2000 rand a month for these military barracks, but we also want to develop young leaders for Zimbabwe. And a wonderful thing is also somebody heard about what we do. He’s from Zambia and he’s funding us to set up a university on a 300 acre farm in Zambia. So students run the school, wherever we are doing this, we’re now in 12 locations across four countries. And the interesting thing is that the institution is 80% self-funding. And people say, well, how is that possible when you don’t get any money from the government and the students only pay 200 rand a month? And so, that is quite a job, but one of the ways we do it is we run these businesses and one of the businesses we run, for example, is Nando’s Call Centre. We’ve got hundreds of people of our students working there. We run the Ster-Kinekor call centre for Afrihost, et cetera, et cetera. So these are some of our biggest employers in the institution. And then we have this Pay It Forward programme that every single student and graduate then funds another student, provided they become successful.
So everyone becomes a philanthropist. We take unemployed, marginalised youth, we help them change their lives, and then we train them to become philanthropists, so they give to the next generation when they become successful. The return on investment on this is, I mean it’s telephone book numbers. And for the students who pay only 200 rand a month and they on average conservatively earn about 10 million over a working career in these different types of jobs in banking or insurance or technology, et cetera, that’s a hundred thousand percent return on investment for them. And so, it’s worthwhile climbing Everest. This is like climbing Everest for them, but it’s worthwhile because when they get to the top, everything changes. And for our donors and partners, it’s a 10000% return on investment. For every rand that gets put in, 84 to a hundred rand will be earned by that individual in their salary. Because of time, and I’m sorry, I’ve gone on, we’ve started a wonderful initiative with the National Department of Basic Education. That’s one of their four main initiatives called E-Cubed. Wendy mentioned that in the beginning. It’s all about training young people in problem solving and being creative, not just on rote learning. And we literally working now with hundreds of thousands of teachers in the country. One of the ways we fund this institution is through Black Economic Empowerment because we found ways to literally help our partners get to level one on the BEE scorecard in every area you can think of, but do this all in a way that can bring marginalised Black youth into our economy. So these are some of our partners who we’ve got to like level one or level two on their BEE scorecards.
So it’s just a wonderful way to leverage government policy that so many people, you know, deplore, but to use it in a good way, the way it should be used. So things like learnership and bursaries and internships and all of this. So, I’m going to conclude, Wendy, and I don’t know if there’s any questions, but just to say that Einstein is a great inspiration for me, says, “There’s only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. And the other is as though everything is a miracle.” And I know many of us as South Africans, we’ve seen it all. South Africans are very resilient people. Many people think there is no future in our country. I don’t believe that, I love and I’m passionate about South Africa. I’ve worked with over 30,000 youth now over the last 28 years. Our youth have extraordinary potential. And yes, our government to a large degree is failing us. I often say South Africa maybe is a failed state, but we’re not a failed society. We have a very strong private sector. We have a strong civil society. We part of that civil society. We’ve got strong resilient individuals in our country. And you see it in our rugby scrum, the strength of those individuals. And I think slowly but surely, if we work together and we see the miracle of what is possible in our country.
So our goal is can we change leadership in South Africa, develop these a hundred thousand young leaders that ultimately will put a trillion rand back into the hands of poor people. I’m not saying it’s easy to do, what I’m saying is extremely hard, but if we embrace hard problems and we don’t run away and we actually get stuck in and we fall in love with these problems, they fixable, these things are changeable. So I’m going to stop there and just say the biggest thank you to you and I’ll stop sharing and let’s just see if there’s any questions. Thank you.
That was brilliant. Thank you.
Thank you.
You are so inspiring.
Thank you for listening. To give, to really dedicate your life to changing and improving the lives of others and also what you’re doing for our beautiful country. I, you know, we’ve been at 25th hour for year for years.
Exactly, exactly.
And it’s so inspirational to hear you speak because we all only want what’s best for South Africa. How did you get the name, the Maharishi?
So Maharishi, so it comes from Sanskrit. Maha means great, rishi is a seer or a knower, or a teacher. So it’s like great teacher. But Maharishi was actually the individual who brought the system of what we call consciousness-based education into the world and founded something called transcendental meditation. So we use meditation every morning, every afternoon. Helps our students just deal with this crippling trauma and stress. I can tell you, Wendy, like, when we start, and 70% of our students are women, and we will teach them to meditate. And literally you’ll sit in a room with a hundred women, 200 women, and you’ll just see their eyes are closed. It’s the first silence they’ve actually had in years. And tears are just rolling down their faces. Their hearts are broken. They’ve just got no one to talk to. They’ve suffered so much abuse, things like that. So we do this day after day after day, and I can tell you after six months, people are not sitting there crying anymore. After six months you just see it’s like this flower that was originally crushed under somebody’s army boot. And now the flower has started to heal and it’s opening up and you see this beautiful smell and this beautiful colours and you see in these people’s eyes and they’re awake now and they’re excited about life and they want to take on the world. And that is our job. We have to take these little crushed things and turn them into world beaters. And that’s why I love my job. And so, nobody has to thank me, I’m so grateful. I’m truly grateful, I’m a very spiritual person and I get on my knees 10 times a day and thank God for doing this work because no one has benefited more than I do.
Yeah, I started when I was there, and one they trust very, very quickly.
Yes, oh, no, the students loved you. It was actually fantastic.
So amazing.
I’m still waiting for some of them to show up here in New York and look you up.
But you know what, to be able, it was the easiest audience because I speak aloud, but yeah, here, it was so easy. They were so receptive and I almost felt like they were trusting me and I was a complete stranger, and a White stranger, female, you know?
No, that’s it. I tell you, these individuals, they blow me away every day.
Yeah.
You know, their courage, we’ve got students who will walk two hours to get to university.
Yeah, awesome.
Walk two hours to get home. They will get up at four o'clock in the morning, but they’ll be there every single day because this is going to change their lives and their family’s lives.
Perfect.
They’re amazing, they’re amazing.
You, you are their hope. You are their hope. And kahle, well, well done. Very, very well done. What a beautiful presentation. There are questions, if so, do you want… I think, can you see them? Will you-
Wendy, would you kindly just maybe ask the questions? And then I can just go through that.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - So, so Margie asks, where do you recruit your staff?
A - Okay, so the extraordinary thing is that 80% of our staff are our own graduates and our own students. And so, as I was saying earlier, it’s quite hard to do something very revolutionary, and if we hire traditional academics, they can be very stuck up and staid and we need people who can see the potential in our students who prepared to work with them on a Saturday if necessary. Like, who prepared to do whatever it takes to help this individual understand a concept in statistics, or finance, or programming, or anything else. The best people to do that are those young people who’ve come through this process who’ve now become successful. So 80% of the people running the institution and our school as well are our own students and graduates, and they have more passion and put in more effort than anyone. And so, it’s really wonderful and that’s really where most of our staff are coming from.
Q - Okay, great, and how do you decide on your curriculum? Is it the government curriculum or do you-
A - Okay, in the high school it’s, the high school is the government curriculum. And then at the university level, we… I do see a question about Maharishi International University here. We do partner with them on a business degree. And then we’ve developed our own curriculum, as I say, for 45 South African national qualifications. So all the time we’re writing more curriculum, developing more programmes, getting more accreditations and registrations. But we also do a lot of these industry exams, why? Because that’s where the jobs are. So what do employers want? They want people with work experience. So we give all the students work experience while they’re in the institution. They want people who understand, like, if you take Bryte Insurance, they used to employ just BCom graduates, but BCom graduates never learned anything about insurance in a three or four year business degree. Whereas we do a three year insurance programme on top of a business degree at the same time. So our students are insurance specialists by the time they come out. Bryte basically only employ them now. They don’t employ anybody else because they’re hiring insurance specialists with insurance work experience, ready off the bat, right, when they come out of university. So this has been a formula that really is working very well for us.
Q - That’s great. How do you select and recruit students and what is the upper age limit for the entry to the institute?
A - Okay, so how we select and recruit students is, it’s the opposite of a normal university. So think our normal university selects and recruits people, who are the best people, who got all the A’s, like, you know, et cetera, all over the world. That’s generally what universities do. We don’t have students with A’s, I think I’ve once ever out of over 20,000 students we work with. Have I ever seen one A? I saw one student who got one A for one subject. I mean, that’s very, very different of course to King David where everyone’s getting six, seven distinctions, et cetera. So we are looking for the people that are truly stuck and marginalised. Our typical student, a young mother’s been raped, been gang raped. She’s sitting in Orange Farm, she’s got two little children, she’s completely stuck. She’s working at pick and pay. She’s never going to break out of poverty in her whole life. And she can’t afford not to work at pick and pay because she needs to put her little children through school and she’s got to buy food and put it on the table. So, because we realised years ago that truly poor people cannot afford a free education. It sounds ironic, but even if you give a poor person a completely free education, they can’t afford it. They need to earn whatever little it is to look after their children, to survive. And so, we realised we have to give the students work while they’re at university, which all of them work.
And so, in this way they earn money, so instead of working at pick and pay, she works at the university and then, and we find jobs through our partners, like Bryte and Accenture and all these different partners. And then students also build their own businesses and that’s how they also make money and so on. And they get mentored and coached and supported. And in this way, people earned not a lot, just enough to make it through. But when they get onto the other side, these graduates end up earning hundreds of thousands, thousands of them are half a million, 1 million ran salaries. Top, top, top level people that they can become. And so, what we are trying to do is just get people across from that unemployment river because that young mother who’s stuck in Orange Farm, it’s very hard to change her life. Almost anything you do, she slips back into poverty. So, we try to invent a poverty breaking machine. And I think that that’s what we’ve done because we literally take these families into the middle class and out of poverty, they’re no longer poor. You cannot say they’re poor anymore. They’re successful people. They’re out in their economy, they’re buying houses, they’re buying cars, they’re putting their kids through nice schools. That’s what we want to do. We want to bring people up with dignity.
Not to mention their self-esteem, you know?
That’s huge thing.
Priceless.
Yeah, and Wendy, especially after decades of Apartheid, you can just imagine, and I tell you, we get some students who come to us 50 years old, imagine going to university at 50, 55, 45, and I go and meet these people, I say, “Why are you coming to university? You’re 50 years old.” In fact, some of our students are studying with their grandparents are at us. And they invariably say to me, “Because of Apartheid, I never got the chance to study. All I ever wanted to do was get an education and prove that I’m worthy of it.” And you get people coming at 50 years old to go to university and we open to anybody. And so, we literally have some classes where there’ll be a student studying with a grandmother and they’re both studying finance and statistics and things like that. So, that’s what it is. Giving these opportunities to individuals. And when a party told you you were useless and second rate, and you’re Black and you’re a a nobody. And we do the opposite of that. We teach these young people, they can do anything in the world that they put their hearts and minds to. And now they see it. Now they see all these thousands of graduates so successful. And we bring graduates back all the time to talk to the youngsters. Oh, they get so inspired. They just get gobsmacked about what is possible.
Well, honestly, I’ve got here so, so proud of what you’ve so successfully achieved, Taddy. Another person, Monica says, “Love this, heartwarming.” I actually echo all of what they’re saying, “An inspirational session.” Thank you. Do you… I’m going to read you just a couple of questions here and then you can ask them.
Q - Yes. Do you have students who you encourage… Do you have any students who you encourage students to consider teaching? And Yeah, you’ve said that, sorry, but I might-
A - We do have many students becoming teachers, and we do grow teachers as well because teaching is a wholly profession. I mean, we need great teachers, people that love their students, that are not there for a paycheck and going to go, you know, on the first strike they can go and do. So we are trying to bring, again, a new generation of teachers in our security academy. We want to create a new generation of security people. In every one of these fields, we want to bring ethics and values and respect and goodness, the things that can take our country forward.
Yeah, yeah, so if somebody says, asks, who are the we? And then I… Ruth says, “Dr. Blecher, I’m speechless. Thank you for your humanity. Absolutely incredible colour-
God is with me, God is with me. We love on miracles in this work. It is just, it’s so profound every day the incredible things that happen to us. You just got to kind of jump off the cliff and then you just let go. And somehow Hashem has been there and we’ve had unbelievable support.
Yeah, Hashem, but honestly, Taddy, you, you are an amazing person, I agree. It’s just like astonishing and mind blowing. You’ve really, really committed yourself to this. And it just showed what leadership. When people have leadership and commitment to their hearts in their right, because I mean, you’ve really dedicated your life and your amazing family. Your wife must be an incredible woman.
My wife is an incredible woman. She’s probably not listening to this 'cause she’s with the kids and I’m in New York here, but she’s an extraordinary person. She’s also a social entrepreneur. She wanted to be in a marriage and in a life of service, like, that would make a difference to other people. And so, we have an incredible family. We have an incredible life. We both love what we do. She works in the institution as well. And this is the stuff we dream about, is how we can change the lives of young people and change the country.
Q - And you sure have. "Do you have any pro disenfranchised young White people?” Somebody’s asking.
A - You know what, it’s a very good question. We’d love to have White students at the moment. White people are selecting against us, I think, because if a white person walks into, a White kid walks into a room and there’s like 500 Black kids in the room, then maybe they think, “Gee, this is not my place to go to university.” But it will change. We’re open to everybody. If somebody’s from a disadvantaged family, they’re marginalised, they don’t get opportunities. And generally, these families are earning combined income of 4,000 rand a month. So that’s like 50,000 rand a year, which is say $3,000 a year. So if a family’s earning less than that, we don’t care about race or who they are, those are the people we want to help.
Q - Right, right. So Taddy, somebody says here, said, “Admirable Taddy, good luck with the future. South Africa can only benefit from you and others like you. Somebody else says I’m gobsmacked.” “Can you provide liberal art, which are not so immediately practical?” Someone’s asking that. And, “Is there a way that we can donate to your institute?” Well, I’m glad that that person brought that up because I would like you to share that with us. And just one question that I do want to just say from Monty Golden, he did ask a question, and I wanted to come back to it. Monty asked… Hi Monty, it’s nice always to see you on Lockdown. He asked if people, if you have students that go onto the sciences?
A - Yes, yeah, no, that’s a great, it’s a great question. So, okay, so thank you so much for ever asked how to help. And we always very grateful for any help 'cause what we do is so hard. But yeah, so just to say that our cost of educating each student per year is just over a thousand dollars a year. And that covers 10 hours of education. Oh, there you are.
I am.
Okay, all books and materials and so everything is included, including things like, just all the specialist courses in software, or cybersecurity, or insurance, or banking, et cetera. But actually for $10,000 for a student, we can do a perpetual bursary. So where we can educate somebody for five years, but what we do is we invest the funds, we only use the interest and then this allows us, so now we can grow to 5,000 students in Joburg. We basically trying to get to be able to educate 5,000 people in perpetuity and then keep growing. And then 10,000 people in perpetuity, kind of like a Cambridge University. Cambridge University’s only got 12,000 students at undergraduate level. So if you think of what a great university Cambridge is, I think there’s no reason why we can’t become the size of Cambridge over time. And we’re doing it at 3% of the cost of sending somebody to Cambridge. You know, you could send a hundred people to our institution compared to like going to Columbia University, or Harvard, or something like that. So if anyone would like to help sponsor a student, then maybe please be in touch with Lockdown University. Is that okay, Wendy?
Yeah, and we are happy to share your details, or you can even mention them right now.
Okay, I could share them. Okay, so, all right, should-
I should be in touch with us.
How would I write into this chat? I don’t know, can I-
Who’s on, is… Karina, is Karina on today, is it?
[Karina] Yes, it’s me. I’ll write it down and I will include it, you know-
Thank you, and maybe we could just send it out to everybody on email. I’ll just give my email address and phone number and then our website is maharishiinstitute.org. And so, yeah, we could send all that information out, Karina.
[Karina] Okay.
And Taddy, maybe would be, would you be willing to, for us to share your details within your email?
Yeah, no, please, absolutely. And anyone who would like to visit, if there’s anyone who’s in South Africa who’s in Johannesburg, or comes to South Johannesburg, or would like to come see us, I would love to show you around. We do a monthly breakfast on the campus and anyone who’s visiting the country, just let us know in advance and come and see, and come and spend time with us. We would love to host you.
So we would, yeah, and I’d highly recommend you going to visit Taddy and the team. It is a really awesome, incredibly experience. And what I probably say that this presentation will be on Lockdown, will be on our website, and encourage your friends, please, those who’ve missed it, please encourage them to listen this awesome presentation. Taddy, a million thanks.
Oh, that’s so nice. Yeah, I’m so grateful. When Wendy came to visit our university and I introduced her, she started, I said, “Please would you talk to some students?” And I put in front of hundreds of students and gave her a microphone. And I said, “Maybe you can talk a bit about your family and you can maybe talk as well about your father’s journey because we want our students to be inspired about what is possible from nothing.” And so, she said, “No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about myself.” And you gave the most riveting talk to our students for about 45 minutes.
About my journey.
But your journey is amazing.
Well, a million, a million thanks everybody for joining us today, and of course to our amazing presenter, Taddy.
Thank you.
Such an absolute pleasure. Welcome to Lockdown University and thank you to be continued. Thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks, Karina. Goodnight and goodbye wherever you are. Enjoy the rest of your day, bye.
Thank you for the opportunity, thank you.