In this deeply reflective conversation, Nangamso Mtsatse, currently the Global Head of Foundational Learning at Teach For All, shares a personal and powerful journey through South Africa’s education system. From long commutes across apartheid-era divides to becoming a national leader in literacy reform, her story is one of persistence, identity, and conviction. We explore the formative experiences that shaped her leadership, her evolving understanding of systems change, and why investing in people, especially women, is at the heart of sustainable education reform. Honest, sharp, and grounded in lived experience, Nangamso brings rare clarity to what it means to lead from within a complex and often inequitable system.
So excited to have you here, Nangamso. First of all, thank you for your time. Let’s start with your current role. What are you doing today, and how did you come into the education sector? I’d love to hear if there was a pivotal moment for you and what you’ve learned on your journey so far.
Thanks, Nora. I'm based in Cape Town and currently the Global Head of Foundational Learning at Teach For All. I've been in the role for about a year and a half, deeply supporting the African region partners and the broader network of 62 network partners to integrate evidence-based foundational learning programs into their two-year fellowships.
A big part of my work, and the one I’m most passionate about, is building a pipeline of future FLN (Foundational Literacy and Numeracy) leaders through our networks and alumni. I also support small and medium-sized organizations with program design, teacher training, and research. I'm especially curious about how to help high-potential organizations scale, access sustainable funding, or collaborate to work at scale. Some of the groups I thought partner with are The Action Foundation (TAF), Luminos Fund, Inspiring Teachers, Angaza Elimu and WordworksSA here in South Africa, and I sit on the research advisory board for Central Square Foundation in India.
So, while my title focuses on foundational learning, a big part of my role is strengthening the ecosystem and supporting the growth of impactful organizations.
And how did you first enter the education space? How has that shaped your understanding of the system?
Like many people in this space, I have a childhood story behind it. My mother was a teacher, and my father was a bus driver who couldn't really read or write. Despite that, they both understood that education was the path to opportunity. I was born in 1992, just two years before South Africa’s democracy, and my parents were determined to give us every chance they didn’t have.
When apartheid schools began desegregating in the late 1980s, my mother went and slept outside the gates of a former white school from 3am to get my sister enrolled. She was one of the first black parents to break that barrier. Because my siblings were already there, it was easier for me to get accepted later, but these schools were still extremely hard to access. There were gatekeeping mechanisms, strict admissions processes, and a subtle but powerful sense of exclusion.
At the same time, I was growing up in Motherwell, a township in Port Elizabeth known for poverty and high crime rates. I spent my weekdays commuting two hours each way to school, and my weekends and holidays back in the township or in a rural village where my mother’s family came from. My cousins didn’t have access to libraries, computers, or even decent school infrastructure.
Those three contrasting environments, elite schools, a township, and a rural village, shaped how I saw the world. I realized early on that education wasn’t just a means to opportunity. It was a divider. It was the mechanism that created and reproduced inequality.
I still remember the day it all clicked. I was in Grade 10, and I picked up the morning newspaper to give to my mom, like I always did. The front-page headline read something like, “Black Parents Sacrificing Their Children’s Culture for Education.” There was a photo of a Black girl sitting among white classmates, smiling politely. She looked exactly like me.
I stared at that picture. I could relate to her so deeply. That tension of moving between two worlds. Suppressing your Africanness to fit into a Westernized education system.
I turned to my mom and said, “Why am I not in the same schools as my friends next door? They walk five minutes to school. I’m waking up before dawn and commuting hours every day.”
She cut me off quickly. “You’ll thank me later,” she said. “All that matters is the quality of your education.”
And in that moment, I realized something was deeply broken. My friends in the township, my cousins in the rural areas, my classmates in the elite schools, we were all the same age. But our lives were shaped entirely by the kind of education we had access to.
That was the first time I consciously understood the structural inequalities of our system.
That’s such a powerful insight. And from there, how did you move into education professionally?
After high school, education was actually my first choice, but I didn’t get a bursary for it. I got one for hockey, which required me to enroll in Human Movement Science. I took it because, in my family, any bursary was a gift.
But it wasn’t the right fit. I was a strong hockey player, I had played at national level, but I got placed in the 12th team. I was upset. Other bursary students were in the second or third team. One day, I snapped, threw my hockey stick down, and walked off the field. The next day, the sports coordinator called me in and said, “If you don’t play, you lose the bursary.”
I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t want to go back to hockey, but I also didn’t want to drop out. I started asking around in my residence, and someone said, “Try the Faculty of Education. They often have bursaries available.”
I had already been accepted into education as a second option. I explained my situation, showed my modules, and they found me a bursary. I could continue with my studies. Ironically, it brought me back to where I had originally wanted to be.
That led to my teaching degree and eventually a practicum in a township school in Pretoria. I started teaching history at a high school. At first, I enjoyed it. The school kept me on after my practicum because the teacher I was covering was on maternity leave.
But moving from student teacher to full-time teacher was jarring. I wasn’t prepared. I had studied pedagogy and theory, but I didn’t know how to handle the real-life complexities of South African classrooms.
I realized that changing one classroom wouldn’t change the system. So, I thought, maybe I need to change how teachers are prepared.
I spent the next five years in a university, working on teacher education programs, research, and language policy. My master’s focused on biases in international assessment studies, especially in relation to language in the South African context. That’s when Nic Spaull, who later became my colleague, reached out. He had read my thesis and wanted to talk. At the time, I was happy shaping future teachers, but then the 2016 PIRLS results came out, and they looked no different than 2010. That was my wake-up call.
I realized we weren’t moving fast enough. I wanted to be closer to the work and help design solutions that could work in real classrooms. That led me to join Funda Wande , where I helped design structured workbooks and programs to close the literacy and numeracy gap for children who, like me back in the day, are growing up in tough conditions.
Thank you for sharing that. I’d love to shift to your leadership journey. How have your leadership skills evolved, and how do you define your leadership today?
This is a big one. I don’t think of leadership as fixed. I see it as dynamic, shifting depending on where you are and what the moment calls for.
Six years ago, I was leading the literacy team at Funda Wande. At that time, the organization was still new, and the kind of leader I had to be was very hands-on. I was conceptualizing content, running workshops, writing structured workbooks, and shaping a team. That required a certain leadership posture, being out in front and guiding every step.
Now, in my current role, it's different. I work alongside other leaders, many of whom are senior in their own right. My leadership isn’t about being in front or above; it's about knowing when to support from the side or from behind. That shift has been a growth journey.
One of the hardest leadership transitions I had to make was when I became CEO of Funda Wande. I was stepping into a big role, following Nic Spaull, who had co-founded the organization and was very well-known and respected in the field. And not only that, he’s a white male academic with a large platform. I’m a Black woman from a township background with no powerful network behind me. The expectations were huge, and I wrestled for a while with how to lead authentically in a space that had been shaped by someone so different from me.
People kept saying, “You’ve got big shoes to fill.” And at first, I internalized that. But then I started saying, “Nic wears a size 11. I wear a size 4. I’m going to lead in my own shoes.”
That mindset shift was pivotal. I stopped trying to imitate anyone else’s leadership and started focusing on what I personally bring, my ability to connect across different communities, my understanding of the system from the inside, my lived experience of educational inequality, and my belief in people.
But it wasn’t easy. When I stepped into the role, no one told me that we had a massive funding gap. I thought the organization was fully funded. Then I was told, “You’ve got six months of operating budget left. We need to raise funds urgently.”
I didn’t have a donor Rolodex or a corporate circle to lean on. But I knew how to build relationships. I knew how to tell our story, how to bring people along, how to connect the dots. So I leaned into that. I learned as I went. I made mistakes, many mistakes, and I had to grow quickly. There were nights I questioned whether I was the right person for the job.
That’s where vulnerability came in. For the first two years, I thought leadership meant having all the answers and showing strength at all times. That was the biggest mistake I made. I was burning out and trying to lead in ways that didn’t come naturally to me.
It wasn’t until I started showing up with vulnerability, acknowledging what I didn’t know, asking for help, and giving space for others to lead, that things shifted. I became a better leader not by tightening control, but by loosening it. By trusting my team, creating the right environment for them to thrive, and leading with clarity without rigidity.
There’s a phrase I come back to often: leadership is about enabling those around you to unlock their potential. That’s when I’ve led best, when I’ve created the kind of space where people feel seen, trusted, and able to do their best work.
And I’ve learned that leadership doesn’t have to mean being the CEO or the one with the title. Leadership can be collaborative, distributed, and deeply human. Today, I know that I’m at my best when I lead with empathy, clarity, and trust, when I help others see the bigger picture and give them the space to own their piece of it.
If you had asked me six years ago what leadership meant, I might have described a title or a position. Now, I see it as a posture. It's about how you show up for the work, for your team, and for the people you're trying to serve.
I love that. And I know you’ve been passionate about supporting other women leaders. What advice would you give to your younger self, or to young women just starting out?
First, be authentic. Once I understood my own leadership identity, everything changed.
Second, understand that solving education isn’t just about technical solutions. It’s about the people. Understand your context, your politics, and how change actually happens.
Third, it’s okay to make mistakes. Learn from them. Don’t be paralyzed by fear of failure.
Fourth, practice vulnerability. Do the inner work. Know yourself so you can lead others better.
And finally, invest in relationships. Even if your social battery is low, stay connected. Relationships are the currency of this work, and they’ve opened doors for me again and again.
Let’s go deeper on systems change. It’s a big buzzword, but what does it actually mean in your experience?
The term is overused, and I’m not sure we all mean the same thing. For me, systems change happens when government integrates evidence-based programs into their core operations and budgets. Not pilots. Not donor-funded side projects. Real, sustained change embedded in the system.
In South Africa, government is the largest funder of education. Philanthropy only accounts for about 1.8 percent. So if we want scale, we need government adoption. That means we must design programs that fit into their budget lines and structures.
Second, we overlook behavioral science. Health systems have mastered this. Look at vaccine adoption during COVID. My father, who was initially against the vaccine, was the first in line when it opened for his age group. Education needs to learn from that kind of behavior shift that has happened in health.
Third, and this is most critical, we ignore the people.
Programs don’t scale themselves. People do. And if we don’t invest in leadership development, we’ll keep losing momentum when champions retire or move on.
This is why I joined Teach For All, because I believe in building the people pipeline for sustainable change.
So true. One last question. What is your long-term vision for education in South Africa or across Africa more broadly?
My vision is to see a foundational learning ecosystem led by Africans, for Africans. Too often, I sit at tables where 50 or 60 percent of the people driving change are not from the continent. That needs to shift.
I’m deeply inspired by India. When I visited Central Square Foundation, I saw an ecosystem led entirely by Indians. That level of ownership is powerful, and I want to help build that here.
I also want to invest in women leaders. Looking back, I didn’t have many spaces where I could show up vulnerably, make mistakes, and be supported. I want to create those spaces for others - safe, collaborative environments for women to grow into their full leadership.
And finally, we need to invest in the next generation of education leaders. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t get funding headlines. But if we don’t build the people pipeline now, we’ll be stuck in the same cycle 20 years from today.
At the end of the day, this is a big challenge, and as the saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. For this work, we need everyone at the table.