About us | Siyavula Foundation

The Siyavula Foundation

In 2017, the Siyavula Foundation was formed as a separate entity from Siyavula Education, to better meet the demand from low and no-income schools for access to Siyavula’s practice software, and due to interest from international grant funders. Siyavula Education and the Siyavula Foundation then formed a strategic partnership to jointly seek to make both the software practice and open online textbooks freely available to students across Africa. In 2023 Siyavula Education was closed, and in 2024 a new commercial entity, Siyavula EdTech Enterprises, was spun out from the Siyavula Foundation.

Features for Learners

Our Reach and Traction

Free learner access to our online practice has resulted in excellent year-on-year growth in the number of learners registering and using the platform to support their learning in Mathematics and Physical Sciences. We had our millionth lifetime sign up in December 2021, and served our 250 millionth question in August 2025.

Free learner access, coupled with regular high-level reporting to provincial education departments in South Africa,is the primary level driving growth in South Africa. With access to our high-level monitoring system, provincial education departments are able to actively encourage usage of the platform through their district officials.

Siyavula's textbooks, which are freely available on the website, have significant reach. According to our analytics data, most of our traffic comes from online search results for textbooks. More than 90% of our textbooks are read on mobile phones.

Measuring Impact

Providing free online textbooks gives learners easy access to learning resources. However, to effect real impact on learning performance, we believe that learners must be able to practise what they are learning. Our theory of change is as follows:

Regular practice of sufficient quantity is needed for impact
If a learner does sufficient work on our platform, it will lead to mastery gains on our platform
Mastery on our platform translates to similar improvements in school performance

To test our theory of change, we have conducted a number of Impact Analyses. The results of these do show that the more a learner practises, the greater the impact they will see on their results.